Are they? They may come out stronger than before in the long term. Yet in the short term they've lost iconic and experienced leaders, their navy, and plenty of other military assets.
I suppose they may be grateful to have an enemy uniting their people. Though it's not like they lost control of the opposition, even if they've had to kill a few thousand at a time.
Oil prices are up, they're getting transiting fees now, as well, and other gulf states were weakened by the conflict.
Assume the leadership of both Iran and the US are kleptocrats who both have motivations to have oil prices high and people dependent on them and it all makes a lot more sense.
That old guy already on deathbed from cancer. He basically given death bonus to the country, immortalized like George Washington of Iran. Thank you. Trump! Greatest American and Iranian and world president!
Doubtful, wishful thinking, America should’ve left well enough alone in 1953. We got rid of a president who was elected, who wanted to nationalize the oil industry within Iran, and when the puppet was installed the Shah he kept it nationalized anyway and for America, the Middle East became a quagmire and still is billions wasted.
Too bad the Pan America highway or a Pan-American Railway is but a dream the Chinese probably will get that high speed rail all the way to Europe once Russia and the Ukraine stop fighting, I might add if it wasn’t for the war. There’s a good possibility. It would already be done by now.
I'm torn between "this was so bad, there's no way that they can forget" and "god, there's just enough time for just enough people to forget". I hate this.
Time will tell. I find it very unlikely that other nations will do nothing if nations and companies start to actually pay Iran money. If Iran get money, then the harbor that the Iranian ship goes to also want a cut, and any strait on the way also want their cut, and then why not just demand a cut if they happen to sail by in range of a military ship. Ships are by nature fairly vulnerable to be intercepted, boarded and cargo confiscated. Historically, from around 1300 to 19th century, shipping companies had to have their own army and cannons on board in order to safe guard cargo on the oceans. One could argue that the current period of international peace on the oceans was an abnormality and we are now returning back to normality.
It seems more likely that the Strait of Hormuz is just in the possession of Iran without grander implications for maritime trade.
What would other countries do? If the US's military might is powerless to control Iran, what chance would any other country have here?
Trump's weakness in giving up the illusion of US power certainly would be a disaster for the US, and world trade, but broader implications seem unlikely.
What can Iran do if other countries consider Iranian ship as free for the taking as retaliation for Iran attacking ships in the strait of hormuz?
What would Australia do if Iran attacked their embassy? They would kick them out, denying Iran an embassy in Australia. When it comes to this stuff, a tit for tat strategy is generally the common tactic. If you attack peaceful trade ships, then your own trade ships is valid target for retaliation. If you start to threaten ships with ransoms, other nations will do the same.
Invading Iran is a complete different subject compared to boarding trading ships well outside the border of Iran. Historically, a Letter of marque was a very cheap way to manage countries which did not respect your own ships. Some laws are still in the law books regarding how to deal with prize ships, which illustrate how close we are to the time where peaceful traversal of waters was not a given.
One of the biggest trade partner for Iran is China. Will China pay the toll? Will Iran attack their ships? Will China retaliate if they do? If China do not need to pay the toll, which other countries would then be willing to one-sided pay for access to the strait?
> What can Iran do if other countries consider Iranian ship as free for the taking as retaliation for Iran attacking ships in the strait of hormuz?
This is exactly what Trump tried. The US was boarding Iranian ships thousands of kilometers away. In the end the US still backed down and agreed to an Iranian toll in the MoU.
Iranian ships have been getting boarded for extremely flimsy reasons for over ten years now. That forced them to adapt to it in such a way that they are now far more resilient to it than the rest of the world is.
There might be. But, from the US point of view, the tolls are not a strategic problem. A conspiracy theorist might even argue that tolls in the Strait of Hormuz make the US oil exports more competitive, and therefore more profitable. The strategic problem for the US (and the rest of the world, Israel obviously included) is for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. One might say that the Memorandum of Understanding is quite vague about that. But the natural conclusion from last Summer and from the last few months is that the US will not hesitate to bomb Iran if it tries to resume its pursuit of the bomb. This does not need to be codified in any agreement, the threat is there implicitly. The MoU is more focused on the carrots than the stick, but the stick is there, in the background, and Iran knows it.
> There might be. But, from the US point of view, the tolls are not a strategic problem
It's a problem pretty much only for the US. The US has been humiliated, embarrassed, and made incredibly weak by showing it can neither protect its allies or its core interests, and that it can not project power despite spending massive amounts of money using its fancy weapons that are supposed to be the best and most expensive in the world.
Further, its shown the world that letting the US keep a strategic base in your country is actually a huge problem for the country, and not a benefit at all.
The US had global alliances that made it very strong, its in the process of destroying all that and isolating itself in order to become weaker and poorer.
Nobody else around the world is hurt much by tariffs on the Strait. Just the US due to its massive own-goal by wasting military power on an undefined goal, with vague aspirations it could never achieve with the resources devoted to it, without convincing the US people that ant war was necessary. It put Iranian leadership on death ground without any alternative except to use all their weapons, seemingly completely unaware of decades of US wargaming about the Strait.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster this is for the US on every possible angle.
I think the president wants this all to go away. None of this is making him look good, and he hates it. If the bombing starts again, the straight will be closed again. He's gonna leave the whole problem for the next president.
The US could make it clear that if earth moving equipment is spotted within half a mile of the Isfahan, Fordow or Natanz previously bombed facilities, they will be bombed again [1].
I sincerely the next president has the guts to wipe his hands of it and get on about the business of building infrastructure within the United States badly needed infrastructure take a page out of China, actually rebuild from within, actually do something useful in Central and South America, rebuild some Goodwill with Canada and Mexico actually try to solve some problems.
Revisit Oak Ridge, Tennessee why are the Chinese dusting off old technology from America and running with it?
As an Iranian, I should mention that all the money going to Iran is not going to the Iranian people. The government will simply gobble it up, like everything else and use it to fund the resistance groups and enrich themselves.
Iranians will not benefit much, however they will benefit from sanction relief for sure. I know some of them has to pass through congress and that's virtually impossible considering the Israeli influence in the US government, but I'm hopeful that TRUMP is at least forced to remove _some_ of them.
Economical sanctions always hurt the ordinary citizens and hardly the government.
Well certainly people will benefit from the removal of sanctions, right? The research quite clearly shows that it's regular people that are most affected by them.
Believe it or not, Gallup used to conduct surveys in Iran up until 2023. For the question of "Is it a good or bad time to find a job" you can see a clear spike from 2017 to 2018 following the abrupt resumption of sanctions. It went from 68% to 92% of people saying it's a bad time to find a job
Something that I found interesting was how far away the USA had to keep its navy. What's the pint of having 11 aircraft carrier groups when you can barely even use them?
They were still used heavily... you think aircraft carriers are only useful if you can get right next to your target? A huge part of American doctrine is to kill the enemy before you are ever in their view. This is also just basically intuitive. I'm not sure what is confusing you. Its like asking why isn't a bomber parked next to its target before taking off and deploying its munitions.
I think the essence of the question you responded to is: The U.S. has a gigantic navy and couldn’t force safe passage through Hormuz. Why is this the case? Is the U.S. wasting its money given this?
If we say that you can fit a small unit of guys equipped with Shahed-136 and launcher, or small missile launcher into just about any civilian garage or small industrial/warehouse-sized structure within a 300 km radius of the strait of hormuz, it would be quite impossible to air strike every possible hiding site without causing absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable civilian casualties.
The capability of the IRGC and Iranian regime to hide small to medium sized drone and missile launch equipment within civilian infrastructure (nevermind caves, bunkers, etc) within range of the strait exceeds the capability of the US forces to destroy or remove it.
As long as major shipping companies believe that the Iranians retain enough drone and missile capacity to hold the straight under threat, they're not going to sail through it.
The only possible way would be an extremely bloody and manpower intensive ground operation to hunt it down at the boots on the ground level.
America knew how to do this once. Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
You simply can't kill your way out of political conflicts into perpetuity, unless you truly plan on annihilating everyone. That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling. His thesis on places like Fallujah is essentially there wasn't enough bloodshed. Americans would be vacationing in Baghdad if only there had been more violence.
> That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling
Pretty much what I said in Jan/Feb of this year when the major, bloody nationwide protests of Iranians (est. 15,000 to 40,000 death toll killed by their own "government") kicked off domestically in Iran. Specifically, that the worst possible people were running the executive branch and DoD at this moment in history and that they would rush headlong into something foolish.
Of course they didn't even prevent those massacres. They watched it happen. As I recall the administration seemed unconvinced of this as a pretext for war, and by the time the decapitation started the regime already had regained total control of the streets. And now a negotiation to give the same regime an economic lifeline just so the administration doesn't have to explain to someone in Iowa why the price of gas is going up.
I recall Reza Pahlavi on Fox News engaging in the delusion that the current administration cared about the Iranian people. Where is he now?
Current American administration unfortunately only care’s and listens to the 1% ruling class in any particular country they support that’s been the problem pretty much since 1945 and because of that they never pay attention to what most of the people in the country care about on the ground, and that’s been a problem in Central and South America and most other countries in the second and third world we just keep getting it wrong and we’re simply running out of steam and money…
>Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".
Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.
Are you joking? That's like saying American troops aren't based in the United States because they (typically) don't roam the streets of major American cities.
This isn't a matter of an opinion or your cute reply, it's a basic fact. Look up American troops stationed in Germany. Ask yourself why European leaders are constantly falling over themselves to placate an American president they clearly despise. For someone who made it to Berlin you sound profoundly ignorant, I mean why don't you ask the Germans you are spending time with (if you make it out the front door) and see if any of them would feel more safe if the United States unilaterally withdrew from NATO. I mean it would be the most tiring conversation ever but whoever is spending time with you has surely already priced that in.
Sir, there are about 50k US Soldiers in Germany. With 80 Million Germans. If every German grabbed a stick in the morning and decided to end the "US occupation" those 50k soldiers wouldn't last until lunch.
There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.
The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.
The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.
Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.
The missile launchers that Iran relied on for many strikes are actually very big, and cannot be hidden in small civilian infrastructure. The US was unable to target them when they were coming out of the very well known and publicly located missile cities because there was no US aircraft that could loiter around them and wait for them to come out without being shot down - that's why the US sent drones to that task, which suffered unsustainable attrition.
And the drones/missile have much more range than 300km. The Shahed-136 drone have a 2000+km range, which is significantly more than the combat radius of carrierborne fighters, even if you add reasonable amounts of refuelling.
The problem in the end isn't that it was impossible to strike every possible hiding site without causing massive casualities. It just wasn't possible. The US failed to durably damage Iranian installations. The backup plan was to exploit air supremacy to interdict whatever was coming in and out of those installations - that also failed. This was an operational failure of US military doctrine, that is unrelated to the tolerance of casualties. It is simply that US military planners overestimated their abilities and made assumptions they couldn't cash. It wasn't a case of casualty avoidance or whatever.
It's also questionable whether a ground invasion of Iran would be feasible to begin with. The Operational Art of War has a great series on the logistics of such an operation, it would be extremely difficult and would most likely require the US to send the troops... through the Strait of Hormuz to begin with.
Historically, this is the norm. The British Navy in WWI was a behemoth, but still couldn't force safe passage through the mines and cannons of the Dardanelles Strait against what was considered a third-rate power. "A ship's a fool to fight a fort."
I think it was a much more specific question. Both are valid.
Iran is a big country ~100 million people. Aircraft carriers can launch planes to disable specific targets. They cant take out an entire country. They could have been more useful if the US was waging total war against Iran, but it isn't/wasnt.
The world is deglobalizing, and while drones may not exert Blue water power projection, they now dominate littoral power projection.
Marine invasions may be impossible in drone combat without drone superiority, and right now, Joan superiority is not a thing that I think exists between two fully drone enabled armies
And note the US army is not a fully drone enabled army.
Aircraft carriers lose efficacy rapidly as distance increases. The aircraft flying from them require refueling and longer-range standoff munitions, which requires super-linearly more sorties to get the desired. This is even worse when the targets are far from shore, which can be the case when you want to bomb large countries.
The American doctrine might be to kill the enemy before you are in their view. But the enemy gets a vote. This is no longer something the US can rely on, even against clever enough middle powers.
It's just true that the assumptions that underpinned the current American force composition and strategy are breaking down. That's why the war went much worse than most mainstream analysts expected.
It's a good question and there are three aspects to this:
1. The US Navy is designed for the Cold WAr. It's often called a "deep blue" Navy because it's designed to operate in the open ocean in deep water. Also, it's designed to operate in colder climates like the North Atlantic and the North Sea. The Persian Gulf is none of those things. It's shallow, warm and narrow. The warm part also matters. It increases wear on ships, it's harder to keep them habitable, you get faster biofouling and so on;
2. Geography just isn't a friend here. The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest is about 6 miles wide. You'll hear claims about it being 2 miles wide. That's incorrect. There are 2 mile wide navigation channels, one in each direction, and they're separated by a ~2 mile wide buffer; and
3. Another clue here was the continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons [1]. Rather than using gravity bombs, missiles continued to be fired from ships and planes. That's inefficient because you lose weight for the munition part to fuel. So you only ever do this if you can't safely use gravity bombs. Therefore, one can conclude that the military could protect air or water assets. Water assets can't be protected mainly from drones. There was a lot of talk about mines and that is a threat but the same drones that essentially destroyed Gulf military bases could overwhelm the defenses of an aircraft carrier battle group too. Plus there's drone boats. But the way aircraft were used also demonstrated a lack of air supremacy.
1. You might want to call up the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and let them know they aren’t designed to operate there. As well as the rest of the Navy that operates in similar waters in SE Asia and the Caribbean.
The US is too used to wars where they have absolute domination and has developed a very low tolerance for casualty. If any ship, not even just a carrier, any ship, gets sunken by an Iranian missile, it will sink the already abysmal approval of the current administration to the bottom of the ocean and if we have learned anything from Biden and Afghanistan it is that you never recover from a shock like that.
Why do you think they were barely used? I dont know, but assume they were being used nearly non stop to support bombing runs. They dont go on land and they dont have cawasn't.
I'm no expert, but the attack range of the carrier flight wing is 4-500 miles
I think everyone is aware this is a toll, but here's NYT from June 15: Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’
> Charging a toll is illegal under international law, but some fees are allowed for services. It is not clear what services Iran would provide, but there were no fees charged before the war.
If the only recourse is to spend tens of billions on another bombing campaign, or even more on a land war, why would Iran be looking for a path out of anything?
Spite against whom? Like most Americans, I have a number of grave concerns about the Iranian regime and the terrible things they've done. But on a personal level, Donald Trump has done a lot more to make me feel spiteful than either Masoud Pezeshkian or Mojtaba Khamenei have. I think everyone involved is well aware of this fact and it's going to continue to severely constrain Trump's options.
It sounds like you agree with me that Americans do not feel that fighting theocracy in Iran is a particularly high priority, and that people who care about it care more about domestic issues. So I'm not sure why you've chosen to express that in such a confrontational tone. Perhaps I've misunderstood something.
>>Like most Americans, I have a number of grave concerns about the Iranian regime
I didn't agree with "most Americans" part. This kind of rhetoric is false and is used to whitewash and launder war crimes and escape responsibility, for example for murdering 160 Iranian school girls in in Minab.
You don't think most Americans would say, if you asked them about the issue, that the Iranian regime is bad and oppressive? I don't think this has anything to do with whitewashing or escaping responsibility for war crimes; obviously we're getting beyond the level of detail most Americans would know, but I personally find it quite easy to believe that both Ahmad Vahidi and Pete Hegseth should be arrested and sent to the Hague.
No, they don't. Perhaps that's where the confusion lies? Americans mostly did not want to bomb Iran in the first place, which is why their representatives in Congress didn't agree to; the regime in the White House just issued illegal orders to start bombing without Congressional authorization. Even had Hegseth not murdered those schoolgirls, the war would still have been illegal, and I would still be calling (perhaps a bit less vehemently) for him to go to prison over it.
The GOP in Congress on multiple occasions voted down restrictions on Trump's activities in Iran. So there's plenty of representatives that do agree with Trump's plan. This isn't anywhere near as clear cut as you're implying.
If they agreed with Trump's plan they would pass a bill affirmatively authorizing it. Many would, of course, but I'm confident many others don't actually agree and simply fear Trump's revenge if they're seen actively opposing him. (Which does not excuse them, I should emphasize, history will record their shameful cowardice.)
This is empty rhetoric, WW2 was the last war where Congress officially declared war.
Vietbam, Iraq, GWOT wars had some form of congress authorization, but the rest of the wars never had any authorization
America been droning and murdering people around the globe with impunity, for example Cambodia bombing which literally put Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge in power and led to genocide. The list of US war crimes is simply too big and I have zero tolerance for whitewashing or excusing this behavior
Your "zero tolerance" attitude is preventing you from understanding that I agree with you. I'm not going to talk to you any further, but I would encourage you to reflect on whether your reflexive hostility here has been an enjoyable or productive use of your time.
What does it tell us that current leadership in Washington lacks the credibility to make that argument? The tariffs and threats to sovereignty of our erstwhile allies have already damaged international norms at least as much as closing the straight of Hormuz.
Why would they not just build a pipeline from Kuwait to Oman or even UAE to the other side of Oman? If the Keystone pipeline is profitable, so would this I would think. Seems like a temporary problem or a fine line for Iran to charge fees low enough the effort would not be worth it...
1. They already did, Fujairah is a major oil port.
2. Fujairah is within drone and missile range of a lot of remaining Iranian strike capability.
3. Fujairah is not really equipped with a large amount of high precision, reliable, expensive, slow to procure and replace air defense systems.
4. Fujairah has already been struck repeatedly since this conflict kicked off.
5. The oil pipeline capacity from the 'west' side of the UAE to Fujairah is nowhere near enough to meet demand, even if the port and oil terminal were considered totally safe by ship owners and cargo owners, which it isn't.
Imagine thinking this was a good idea when you cut your ribbon after all that money and effort and then a ~$500 drone flies over and with one explosion has it leaking.
Do you think people are dumb? Obviously beneficial and easy actions that no one has taken rarely exist in the real world. You're basically suggesting the people actually there who have a better view than you are profoundly stupid.
Oil pipelines are underground. The small proportions of above-ground sections were indeed targeted in this recent conflict but in war-prone areas so is the rest of your oil infrastructure including ships at sea and the ground based facilities can be fortified and defended.
Is it vulnerable to the same sort of asymmetric attack, yes or no?
Can the system run if those above ground areas are destroyed? Of course hypothetically they can be defended. Just like hypothetically a few drones should not be able to shut the world's most powerful navy out of the strait.
In reality we know the real answer lies in an admission of your answer. The best defense is electing governments which will not wantonly engage in armed conflicts.
If this was obvious to some random guy like me at least two months ago [1][2] without access to intelligence community information and military assessments then this should surprise absolutely no one in the administration. I said then and have been vindicated (IMHO): this will go down as the largest strategic blunder in US history. It's also going to reshape the region away from US influence because of the hollowness of US security guarantees. The GCC are going to have to deal with Iran as a fellow oil-producing nation. A big loser here is the UAE and I'm not sure that Dubai ever recovers.
Before all of this, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz was a theory that was never tested. Traffic passed freely. But a war was forced upon them by the US and Israel so if any of these countries (or anyone else for that matter) is unhappy at the outcome, you know where to point the finger.
One irony in all this is that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea would guarantee free transit passage through territorial waters like the Strait of Hormuz. Iran isn't a signatory. The ironic part is that the United States isn't either.
People used to jokingly say that the way to prosperity is for the U.S. to defeat you in a war. Soon people will jokingly say the way to prosperity is for you to defeat the U.S. in a war. The sequel to The Mouse that Roared is The Lion that Squeaked.
Maybe I'm misreading this. Tone and particularly sarcasm can be lost in text. But I think that comment you're responding to was making fun of the administration.
One thing this administration is not known for is taking accountability and admitting they made a massive error. No, it'll be someone else's fault so we'll move on to whoever the next bogeyman is. And it can't be China because the US just objectively lost a war with Iran. You think we're going to win a war with China? No. What we really need is a tune-up fight. A bit like how Reagan invaded Grenada two days after the Beiruit bombing that ultimately led to US withdrawal from Lebanon.
This was basically soothing our hurt feelings by using the US miltiary, the largest in the world, to invade a Sandals resort.
I wonder what happened to the Iranian buddies? So many HN accounts whose Iranian friends were all supposedly celebrating the US-Israeli bombings of their country of origin. Are they still cheering?
Were straits not doing insurance at all before? Would have thought that all straits were charging for it after the Ever Given disaster. The strategy can’t permanently be “wait for the EU or US to fix it in a week as worldwide markets crash”.
And here comes the hell of unnoticed collateral effects
For example. Are the bombs throw over Iran, cancelling the monsoon rains in several states of India?
> "After an encouraging start to the SW monsoon season, India is now witnessing a prolonged pause in its advance, raising concerns over rainfall deficits, soaring temperatures and water shortages in some states. (source: Bussiness Standard)"
Betteridge’s law strikes again. (I came close to finishing that sentence with a question mark. Oh the irony)
More seriously, I looked at the article you linked. It talks about lots if complex climate stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t think it mentions bombs as a cause. Or the war. Please show your receipts.
> It talks about complex climate stuff that I don’t understand.
Not your fault. The biosphere is a extremely complex system. We pay researchers for spending their lives studying the details of the whole picture at a fine grain level so we can react on time, lets go ...
[error 404: Scientist not found. Data deleted. DOGE was here]
Hum, though luck, the best expert advice can't work when everybody is anti-science. Maybe nobody will be able to prove this pretty obvious effect before the damage. A hint: hot air goes up, like insurance costs will.
War is one way of forcing political will on another. The US military executed nearly flawlessly yet US leadership doesn't want to pay the cost of defeating Iran by force.
Why even have this military if anything that affects the market makes the US cower in fear?
on that last one: don't americans talk a lot of shit about hamas using residential areas as cover? what, pray tell, is cohousing your military with civilian in hotels?
* USA (or Israel really) started this war on their own terms at a time of their choosing. But they werent prepared at all.
* Incredibly valuable things like THAAD radars (like $1B per unit) were taken out by $1000 drones.. We've all seen the war in Ukraine, we all know Iran makes Shahed drones. US seemed to be completely unprepared for this.
* US was using $1M pac 3 patriot missiles to shoot down $1000 drones, utterly failing the shot exchange problem. Also US has run down its stockpiles of many missiles to 50% or less. It will take 3 or 4 years to return many items to acceptable levels, and wont be able sell any either, leaving customers seeking alternatives.
* Clear miscoordination and lack of clarity between US and allies. Like no-one really knew what was happening or why, leading to stuff like the ghost of Kuwait.
Classic trump regieme action. No-one competent in the room. Just impulsively doing random shit each day with no strategy or understanding.
The US military exhibited numerous flaws. To cover numerous flaws not yet covered by other replies:
* Required the deployment of assets beyond their useful operational capability (which caused the aircraft carrier to catch fire).
* Demonstrated that their targeting list is not only based on outdated information, but failed to update that information when informed it was outdated (which led to the bombing of the elementary school).
* Failed to anticipate literally the one military contingency everyone expected Iran to do--close the strait. Hell, even after it was clear that was happened and everyone was screaming "what are you going to do about it?" the answer was, shockingly "absolutely nothing."
* Failed to adequately secure supply lines to ensure that military units in the area have sufficient food. This is literally logistics 101 stuff.
* Defined operational success criteria not based on results achieved but on effort spent--in other words, how many bombs you launched rather than whether or not the targets you wanted destroyed were destroyed.
* Definitely several C2 issues we're not entirely privy to, given the midair collision that cost a tanker, and the loss of an AWACS unit.
The strategic issues are even more myriad, but since strategy is supposed to be largely a civilian, not military, decision, it's not really the military's fault. Except I will note that a lot of civilians in this field do come from ex-military background, and there does seem to be a major recurring problem that CENTCOM is producing a lot of people with really bad strategic judgement that is partially responsible for this debacle in the first place. Really to the point that we should consider blackballing everyone from CENTCOM from ever having a military or civilian defense job of importance ever again.
Us military has had active demonstrations of the importance of advanced drone munitions FOR TEN YEARS NOW and completely dropped the ball.
It is clear that an organizational level the US military does not have infantry level short and medium-range drone capability like Ukraine does, and more importantly, like all of our enemies do.
It's not just a matter of the US military needing to do a bunch a weapons designs. Procurement politics can't close the drone capability gap.
Because the fundamental capability is cheap and flexible, whereas the entire Pentagon weapons procurement is big, expensive and inflexible
The US Marines are now functionally ineffective. The US cannot execute a marine invasion in the current military capabilities, not without taking publicly untenable losses
The US Navy still has deep water capability and can still exert strategic influence, but at a tactical level, which is in near shore/littoral arenas, they are now useless, and the political procurement process to make weapons to make them relevant again is the same problem. The infantry level one does, but it's even bigger and has even more organizational resistance
For all of Iran's supposed mastery of drone warfare, do note that the damage those drones have done to the US military is... essentially nil. No ships have been sunk; no aircraft have been lost. There have been some lives lost due to a drone attack on a facility troops were staying area, but at first read, I'm going to chalk that up more to the US military generally not planning for Iran to respond at all to a bombing raid rather than drones per se being particularly effective. Where the drones have been effective have been as a form of precision bombing--exactly the same kind of missions the US military has achieved with its regular air forces, albeit at a considerably greater distance from its homeland than any drone-based force has been able to achieve.
I think many people are way too quick to point to drone warfare as the obvious future of warfare, without considering the environment in which wars operate and how it might play out differently for different combatants. The US has a general assumption of complete and total air superiority in its conflicts--and the last time it didn't have that was over 70 years ago--and the number of countries that can meaningfully contest US air superiority is unknown but very few. The lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War--a conflict where neither side has air superiority--are thus somewhat limited for a US conflict against most of its enemies. (Although I do agree that the US military is too sanguine about not learning from the Russo-Ukrainian War).
USAF did lose an AWACS plane to a drone attack. Why? It was out in the open. I would think some minimal concealment / camouflage would have made an easy drone target into an impossible one. Same with the early warning radars that were destroyed; someone was asleep in command not posturing these systems such that they were at least slightly harder to find and hit.
Overall, the drones were militarily a bunch of mosquito's. None of the US allies 'enjoyed' having civilian targets hit by the Iranian drones, but the military impact was minor at best.
Unless you want to put boots on the ground, you send missiles and drop bombs.
The Iranian drones would have been a lot more of a problem if they were harassing ground troops on the way to Tehran.
(does the US need counter drone systems? yes, absolutely. is air superiority dead? not at all)
The cost of defeating Iran military (in enough detail to stop them from firing rockets at ships or doing insurgency harassment etc) would probably take years, so honestly the whole operation was unrealistic from the outset without trying to install a favored successor.
> Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
Is this really just about the market? I imagine it's also about a ton of body bags coming back just around the midterms. Because that will happen in a ground war.
There was never a buildup of even 1/50th of the ground forces that would have been required to occupy the major military sites, industrial sites and large cities (nevermind attempt to control the countryside). The buildup to the 2003 Iraq War started 12+ months in advance with thousands of vehicles, cargo containers, equipment and 150,000+ guys collecting in bases in Kuwait.
Iran is also considerably more mountainous than Iraq, if one looks at a topo map of Iraq and examines all the generally 'flat, somewhere generally near the Euphrates' area vs a population density map in people per square km. Yeah there's more complicated terrain in the northern part of the country, but nowhere on the size/scale of what exists in Iran.
> > Why even have this military if anything that affects the market makes the US cower in fear?
First of all the chain of those cowering in fear begins with the the actors around ship transit , meaning the owners but also the seamen , they don't want to cross if there is a > 5% chance of being hit . And the seamen are actually being forced to accept such risk, they signed up for something else entirely, their risk preference would be around 0.0% because these days nobody dies at sea anymore.
Without Hormuz the world runs out of oil and that is a much bigger problem than just stock market going down
With the mines and drones and asymmetric warfare you'd need to conquer the entirety of Iran alley by alley and mountain by mountain to secure the strait for a risk tolerance in line with the aforementioned 5%
This war was lost when the U.S. wasn't ready to intervene during the week of popular uprise against the regime, had the intervention happened back then , maybe it could have been possible to overthrow the Ayatollah system and reinstall the Shah (who btw was no Saint either)
John Mearsheimer has called this right from the first day, he said that Iran 'holds all the cards' and he's been right on everything down to a T (no pun intended) [0]
It has been an acrobatic adventure in the Middle East with lots of expenses and very little human losses to follow the 'Greater Israel' ambition of Israel and Bibi. But we must not forget that we killed their Supreme Leader and Religious Leader all wrapped in one , they will not let this slide and with the asymmetric war and warfare this Administration has exposed itself to potentially another 9/11 that would at that point force a ground war with lots of victims.
Iran calls notwithstanding, Mearsheimer is a complete clown with regard to Ukraine calls
2014 - Claimed Putin had no interest in annexing large parts of Ukraine, conquering it, or pursuing regime change
Feb 2022 - Putin had “no intention of invading Ukraine” in the sense of large-scale conquest (days before the invasion)
June 2022 - “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state… Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia… the Russians pursued a limited aims strategy”
Repeated claim (2014–2022): Putin is a rational actor who understands the costs and would not pursue maximalist territorial or imperial goals in Ukraine
So there are tolls after all and they’re going to make Iran money.
We paid to get out of kerfuffle in hopes voters forget by the midterms.
I'd bet Iran will find a way remind voters in October.
Are you kidding, Iran is loving the current US leadership.
Are they? They may come out stronger than before in the long term. Yet in the short term they've lost iconic and experienced leaders, their navy, and plenty of other military assets.
I suppose they may be grateful to have an enemy uniting their people. Though it's not like they lost control of the opposition, even if they've had to kill a few thousand at a time.
> Yet in the short term they've lost iconic and experienced leaders, their navy, and plenty of other military assets.
They lost old hardware and aging leaders (some were already dying). Now, replaced with fresh and energetic leadership and pipeline for modern tech.
And we’re basically paying for the upgrades…
> Yet in the short term they've lost iconic and experienced leaders
Not an issue for those promoted into their places!
There is still a moderate faction in Iran that the IRGC needs an excuse to execute.
Oil prices are up, they're getting transiting fees now, as well, and other gulf states were weakened by the conflict.
Assume the leadership of both Iran and the US are kleptocrats who both have motivations to have oil prices high and people dependent on them and it all makes a lot more sense.
The Iranian people, that's a different story.
That old guy already on deathbed from cancer. He basically given death bonus to the country, immortalized like George Washington of Iran. Thank you. Trump! Greatest American and Iranian and world president!
Their stranglehold on power is in no small way influenced by having an enemy.
America bringing destruction and failing to bring freedom from their current tyranny has doubtfully bought us many more friends in Iran.
Doubtful, wishful thinking, America should’ve left well enough alone in 1953. We got rid of a president who was elected, who wanted to nationalize the oil industry within Iran, and when the puppet was installed the Shah he kept it nationalized anyway and for America, the Middle East became a quagmire and still is billions wasted.
Too bad the Pan America highway or a Pan-American Railway is but a dream the Chinese probably will get that high speed rail all the way to Europe once Russia and the Ukraine stop fighting, I might add if it wasn’t for the war. There’s a good possibility. It would already be done by now.
Mosaddegh was appointed by the Shah and Iran was very far from a functioning democracy with fair elections in 1953.
Nothing surprising ever happens in October. You're talking crazy here.
I'm torn between "this was so bad, there's no way that they can forget" and "god, there's just enough time for just enough people to forget". I hate this.
Paid starting it. Paid during it. Paid to end it.
Political capital + diplomatic reputation + military reputation + strategic reputation.. and cash.
Time will tell. I find it very unlikely that other nations will do nothing if nations and companies start to actually pay Iran money. If Iran get money, then the harbor that the Iranian ship goes to also want a cut, and any strait on the way also want their cut, and then why not just demand a cut if they happen to sail by in range of a military ship. Ships are by nature fairly vulnerable to be intercepted, boarded and cargo confiscated. Historically, from around 1300 to 19th century, shipping companies had to have their own army and cannons on board in order to safe guard cargo on the oceans. One could argue that the current period of international peace on the oceans was an abnormality and we are now returning back to normality.
It seems more likely that the Strait of Hormuz is just in the possession of Iran without grander implications for maritime trade.
What would other countries do? If the US's military might is powerless to control Iran, what chance would any other country have here?
Trump's weakness in giving up the illusion of US power certainly would be a disaster for the US, and world trade, but broader implications seem unlikely.
What can Iran do if other countries consider Iranian ship as free for the taking as retaliation for Iran attacking ships in the strait of hormuz?
What would Australia do if Iran attacked their embassy? They would kick them out, denying Iran an embassy in Australia. When it comes to this stuff, a tit for tat strategy is generally the common tactic. If you attack peaceful trade ships, then your own trade ships is valid target for retaliation. If you start to threaten ships with ransoms, other nations will do the same.
Invading Iran is a complete different subject compared to boarding trading ships well outside the border of Iran. Historically, a Letter of marque was a very cheap way to manage countries which did not respect your own ships. Some laws are still in the law books regarding how to deal with prize ships, which illustrate how close we are to the time where peaceful traversal of waters was not a given.
One of the biggest trade partner for Iran is China. Will China pay the toll? Will Iran attack their ships? Will China retaliate if they do? If China do not need to pay the toll, which other countries would then be willing to one-sided pay for access to the strait?
> What can Iran do if other countries consider Iranian ship as free for the taking as retaliation for Iran attacking ships in the strait of hormuz?
This is exactly what Trump tried. The US was boarding Iranian ships thousands of kilometers away. In the end the US still backed down and agreed to an Iranian toll in the MoU.
Iranian ships have been getting boarded for extremely flimsy reasons for over ten years now. That forced them to adapt to it in such a way that they are now far more resilient to it than the rest of the world is.
They should call it a Trump tax.
There might be. But, from the US point of view, the tolls are not a strategic problem. A conspiracy theorist might even argue that tolls in the Strait of Hormuz make the US oil exports more competitive, and therefore more profitable. The strategic problem for the US (and the rest of the world, Israel obviously included) is for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. One might say that the Memorandum of Understanding is quite vague about that. But the natural conclusion from last Summer and from the last few months is that the US will not hesitate to bomb Iran if it tries to resume its pursuit of the bomb. This does not need to be codified in any agreement, the threat is there implicitly. The MoU is more focused on the carrots than the stick, but the stick is there, in the background, and Iran knows it.
> There might be. But, from the US point of view, the tolls are not a strategic problem
It's a problem pretty much only for the US. The US has been humiliated, embarrassed, and made incredibly weak by showing it can neither protect its allies or its core interests, and that it can not project power despite spending massive amounts of money using its fancy weapons that are supposed to be the best and most expensive in the world.
Further, its shown the world that letting the US keep a strategic base in your country is actually a huge problem for the country, and not a benefit at all.
The US had global alliances that made it very strong, its in the process of destroying all that and isolating itself in order to become weaker and poorer.
Nobody else around the world is hurt much by tariffs on the Strait. Just the US due to its massive own-goal by wasting military power on an undefined goal, with vague aspirations it could never achieve with the resources devoted to it, without convincing the US people that ant war was necessary. It put Iranian leadership on death ground without any alternative except to use all their weapons, seemingly completely unaware of decades of US wargaming about the Strait.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster this is for the US on every possible angle.
I think the president wants this all to go away. None of this is making him look good, and he hates it. If the bombing starts again, the straight will be closed again. He's gonna leave the whole problem for the next president.
The US could make it clear that if earth moving equipment is spotted within half a mile of the Isfahan, Fordow or Natanz previously bombed facilities, they will be bombed again [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran#Main_f...
I sincerely the next president has the guts to wipe his hands of it and get on about the business of building infrastructure within the United States badly needed infrastructure take a page out of China, actually rebuild from within, actually do something useful in Central and South America, rebuild some Goodwill with Canada and Mexico actually try to solve some problems.
Revisit Oak Ridge, Tennessee why are the Chinese dusting off old technology from America and running with it?
Are we all tired of so much winning yet?
As an Iranian, I should mention that all the money going to Iran is not going to the Iranian people. The government will simply gobble it up, like everything else and use it to fund the resistance groups and enrich themselves.
Iranians will not benefit much, however they will benefit from sanction relief for sure. I know some of them has to pass through congress and that's virtually impossible considering the Israeli influence in the US government, but I'm hopeful that TRUMP is at least forced to remove _some_ of them.
Economical sanctions always hurt the ordinary citizens and hardly the government.
Well certainly people will benefit from the removal of sanctions, right? The research quite clearly shows that it's regular people that are most affected by them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S017626802...
Believe it or not, Gallup used to conduct surveys in Iran up until 2023. For the question of "Is it a good or bad time to find a job" you can see a clear spike from 2017 to 2018 following the abrupt resumption of sanctions. It went from 68% to 92% of people saying it's a bad time to find a job
https://news.gallup.com/poll/611210/iran-votes-lukewarm-lead...
Mission accomplished!
fool me three times and shame on... somebody
"Help is coming". Came that indeed.
Something that I found interesting was how far away the USA had to keep its navy. What's the pint of having 11 aircraft carrier groups when you can barely even use them?
They were still used heavily... you think aircraft carriers are only useful if you can get right next to your target? A huge part of American doctrine is to kill the enemy before you are ever in their view. This is also just basically intuitive. I'm not sure what is confusing you. Its like asking why isn't a bomber parked next to its target before taking off and deploying its munitions.
I think the essence of the question you responded to is: The U.S. has a gigantic navy and couldn’t force safe passage through Hormuz. Why is this the case? Is the U.S. wasting its money given this?
If we say that you can fit a small unit of guys equipped with Shahed-136 and launcher, or small missile launcher into just about any civilian garage or small industrial/warehouse-sized structure within a 300 km radius of the strait of hormuz, it would be quite impossible to air strike every possible hiding site without causing absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable civilian casualties.
The capability of the IRGC and Iranian regime to hide small to medium sized drone and missile launch equipment within civilian infrastructure (nevermind caves, bunkers, etc) within range of the strait exceeds the capability of the US forces to destroy or remove it.
As long as major shipping companies believe that the Iranians retain enough drone and missile capacity to hold the straight under threat, they're not going to sail through it.
The only possible way would be an extremely bloody and manpower intensive ground operation to hunt it down at the boots on the ground level.
Which will also not work.
America knew how to do this once. Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
You simply can't kill your way out of political conflicts into perpetuity, unless you truly plan on annihilating everyone. That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling. His thesis on places like Fallujah is essentially there wasn't enough bloodshed. Americans would be vacationing in Baghdad if only there had been more violence.
> That is part of what makes the alcoholic running the DoD so galling
Pretty much what I said in Jan/Feb of this year when the major, bloody nationwide protests of Iranians (est. 15,000 to 40,000 death toll killed by their own "government") kicked off domestically in Iran. Specifically, that the worst possible people were running the executive branch and DoD at this moment in history and that they would rush headlong into something foolish.
Of course they didn't even prevent those massacres. They watched it happen. As I recall the administration seemed unconvinced of this as a pretext for war, and by the time the decapitation started the regime already had regained total control of the streets. And now a negotiation to give the same regime an economic lifeline just so the administration doesn't have to explain to someone in Iowa why the price of gas is going up.
I recall Reza Pahlavi on Fox News engaging in the delusion that the current administration cared about the Iranian people. Where is he now?
Current American administration unfortunately only care’s and listens to the 1% ruling class in any particular country they support that’s been the problem pretty much since 1945 and because of that they never pay attention to what most of the people in the country care about on the ground, and that’s been a problem in Central and South America and most other countries in the second and third world we just keep getting it wrong and we’re simply running out of steam and money…
>Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.
I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".
Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.
Are you joking? That's like saying American troops aren't based in the United States because they (typically) don't roam the streets of major American cities.
This isn't a matter of an opinion or your cute reply, it's a basic fact. Look up American troops stationed in Germany. Ask yourself why European leaders are constantly falling over themselves to placate an American president they clearly despise. For someone who made it to Berlin you sound profoundly ignorant, I mean why don't you ask the Germans you are spending time with (if you make it out the front door) and see if any of them would feel more safe if the United States unilaterally withdrew from NATO. I mean it would be the most tiring conversation ever but whoever is spending time with you has surely already priced that in.
Sir, there are about 50k US Soldiers in Germany. With 80 Million Germans. If every German grabbed a stick in the morning and decided to end the "US occupation" those 50k soldiers wouldn't last until lunch.
There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.
The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.
The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.
Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.
Also stay feisty, refreshing.
The missile launchers that Iran relied on for many strikes are actually very big, and cannot be hidden in small civilian infrastructure. The US was unable to target them when they were coming out of the very well known and publicly located missile cities because there was no US aircraft that could loiter around them and wait for them to come out without being shot down - that's why the US sent drones to that task, which suffered unsustainable attrition.
And the drones/missile have much more range than 300km. The Shahed-136 drone have a 2000+km range, which is significantly more than the combat radius of carrierborne fighters, even if you add reasonable amounts of refuelling.
The problem in the end isn't that it was impossible to strike every possible hiding site without causing massive casualities. It just wasn't possible. The US failed to durably damage Iranian installations. The backup plan was to exploit air supremacy to interdict whatever was coming in and out of those installations - that also failed. This was an operational failure of US military doctrine, that is unrelated to the tolerance of casualties. It is simply that US military planners overestimated their abilities and made assumptions they couldn't cash. It wasn't a case of casualty avoidance or whatever.
It's also questionable whether a ground invasion of Iran would be feasible to begin with. The Operational Art of War has a great series on the logistics of such an operation, it would be extremely difficult and would most likely require the US to send the troops... through the Strait of Hormuz to begin with.
Historically, this is the norm. The British Navy in WWI was a behemoth, but still couldn't force safe passage through the mines and cannons of the Dardanelles Strait against what was considered a third-rate power. "A ship's a fool to fight a fort."
Because Iran is a huge country with a powerful military and the straight of Hormuz is a tiny spec of water?
Obviously this operation was a massive waste.
I think it was a much more specific question. Both are valid.
Iran is a big country ~100 million people. Aircraft carriers can launch planes to disable specific targets. They cant take out an entire country. They could have been more useful if the US was waging total war against Iran, but it isn't/wasnt.
The answer is yes.
The world is deglobalizing, and while drones may not exert Blue water power projection, they now dominate littoral power projection.
Marine invasions may be impossible in drone combat without drone superiority, and right now, Joan superiority is not a thing that I think exists between two fully drone enabled armies
And note the US army is not a fully drone enabled army.
Aircraft carriers lose efficacy rapidly as distance increases. The aircraft flying from them require refueling and longer-range standoff munitions, which requires super-linearly more sorties to get the desired. This is even worse when the targets are far from shore, which can be the case when you want to bomb large countries.
The American doctrine might be to kill the enemy before you are in their view. But the enemy gets a vote. This is no longer something the US can rely on, even against clever enough middle powers.
It's just true that the assumptions that underpinned the current American force composition and strategy are breaking down. That's why the war went much worse than most mainstream analysts expected.
It's a good question and there are three aspects to this:
1. The US Navy is designed for the Cold WAr. It's often called a "deep blue" Navy because it's designed to operate in the open ocean in deep water. Also, it's designed to operate in colder climates like the North Atlantic and the North Sea. The Persian Gulf is none of those things. It's shallow, warm and narrow. The warm part also matters. It increases wear on ships, it's harder to keep them habitable, you get faster biofouling and so on;
2. Geography just isn't a friend here. The navigable part of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest is about 6 miles wide. You'll hear claims about it being 2 miles wide. That's incorrect. There are 2 mile wide navigation channels, one in each direction, and they're separated by a ~2 mile wide buffer; and
3. Another clue here was the continued use of so-called "stand off" weapons [1]. Rather than using gravity bombs, missiles continued to be fired from ships and planes. That's inefficient because you lose weight for the munition part to fuel. So you only ever do this if you can't safely use gravity bombs. Therefore, one can conclude that the military could protect air or water assets. Water assets can't be protected mainly from drones. There was a lot of talk about mines and that is a threat but the same drones that essentially destroyed Gulf military bases could overwhelm the defenses of an aircraft carrier battle group too. Plus there's drone boats. But the way aircraft were used also demonstrated a lack of air supremacy.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380176
1. You might want to call up the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and let them know they aren’t designed to operate there. As well as the rest of the Navy that operates in similar waters in SE Asia and the Caribbean.
The US is too used to wars where they have absolute domination and has developed a very low tolerance for casualty. If any ship, not even just a carrier, any ship, gets sunken by an Iranian missile, it will sink the already abysmal approval of the current administration to the bottom of the ocean and if we have learned anything from Biden and Afghanistan it is that you never recover from a shock like that.
Is there a map that shows generally where they are?
This is updated weekly. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/us-naval-update-map-j...
https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker
Why do you think they were barely used? I dont know, but assume they were being used nearly non stop to support bombing runs. They dont go on land and they dont have cawasn't.
I'm no expert, but the attack range of the carrier flight wing is 4-500 miles
cawasn't?
To the victor belong the insurance policy commissions
It's a weird editorial choise to call them insurance and fees in the headline. Usually only the extortioner uses euphemisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
I think everyone is aware this is a toll, but here's NYT from June 15: Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’
> Charging a toll is illegal under international law, but some fees are allowed for services. It is not clear what services Iran would provide, but there were no fees charged before the war.
The low bar path out for Iran is not to charge US ships insurance. The people most likely to complain would not complain if America has an exception.
Does anything America imports through the Strait travel on U.S.-flagged vessels?
The US import very little from Hormuz on any ship. Most buy ers are in asia or europe.
If the only recourse is to spend tens of billions on another bombing campaign, or even more on a land war, why would Iran be looking for a path out of anything?
Americans are fueled by spite, though.
I see
Spite against whom? Like most Americans, I have a number of grave concerns about the Iranian regime and the terrible things they've done. But on a personal level, Donald Trump has done a lot more to make me feel spiteful than either Masoud Pezeshkian or Mojtaba Khamenei have. I think everyone involved is well aware of this fact and it's going to continue to severely constrain Trump's options.
Americans have zero concerns about Iran, they care more about inflation and gas prices, it is evident in all surveys.
the only people who have grave concerns over Iran are the ones who have monetary incentive to do so, or ethnical tribalism reason
It sounds like you agree with me that Americans do not feel that fighting theocracy in Iran is a particularly high priority, and that people who care about it care more about domestic issues. So I'm not sure why you've chosen to express that in such a confrontational tone. Perhaps I've misunderstood something.
>>Like most Americans, I have a number of grave concerns about the Iranian regime
I didn't agree with "most Americans" part. This kind of rhetoric is false and is used to whitewash and launder war crimes and escape responsibility, for example for murdering 160 Iranian school girls in in Minab.
You don't think most Americans would say, if you asked them about the issue, that the Iranian regime is bad and oppressive? I don't think this has anything to do with whitewashing or escaping responsibility for war crimes; obviously we're getting beyond the level of detail most Americans would know, but I personally find it quite easy to believe that both Ahmad Vahidi and Pete Hegseth should be arrested and sent to the Hague.
do Americans care enough about Iran, to murder 160 innocent girls ??
there are many ways to phrase a question and make it seem like very low stakes, while it causes actual human lives on the other end of the globe
No, they don't. Perhaps that's where the confusion lies? Americans mostly did not want to bomb Iran in the first place, which is why their representatives in Congress didn't agree to; the regime in the White House just issued illegal orders to start bombing without Congressional authorization. Even had Hegseth not murdered those schoolgirls, the war would still have been illegal, and I would still be calling (perhaps a bit less vehemently) for him to go to prison over it.
The GOP in Congress on multiple occasions voted down restrictions on Trump's activities in Iran. So there's plenty of representatives that do agree with Trump's plan. This isn't anywhere near as clear cut as you're implying.
If they agreed with Trump's plan they would pass a bill affirmatively authorizing it. Many would, of course, but I'm confident many others don't actually agree and simply fear Trump's revenge if they're seen actively opposing him. (Which does not excuse them, I should emphasize, history will record their shameful cowardice.)
This is empty rhetoric, WW2 was the last war where Congress officially declared war. Vietbam, Iraq, GWOT wars had some form of congress authorization, but the rest of the wars never had any authorization
America been droning and murdering people around the globe with impunity, for example Cambodia bombing which literally put Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge in power and led to genocide. The list of US war crimes is simply too big and I have zero tolerance for whitewashing or excusing this behavior
Your "zero tolerance" attitude is preventing you from understanding that I agree with you. I'm not going to talk to you any further, but I would encourage you to reflect on whether your reflexive hostility here has been an enjoyable or productive use of your time.
Yeah, this is an amusing but incredibly stupid thread.
It affects global prices and sets a precedent against rules on international waters and freedom of navigation.
What does it tell us that current leadership in Washington lacks the credibility to make that argument? The tariffs and threats to sovereignty of our erstwhile allies have already damaged international norms at least as much as closing the straight of Hormuz.
There is zero commercial shipping through the Strait with US flags, everybody uses flags of convenience.
The US could also get into this racket then by offering US ship registrations at a very reasonable price...
> US ships
What US ships?
Why would they not just build a pipeline from Kuwait to Oman or even UAE to the other side of Oman? If the Keystone pipeline is profitable, so would this I would think. Seems like a temporary problem or a fine line for Iran to charge fees low enough the effort would not be worth it...
1. They already did, Fujairah is a major oil port.
2. Fujairah is within drone and missile range of a lot of remaining Iranian strike capability.
3. Fujairah is not really equipped with a large amount of high precision, reliable, expensive, slow to procure and replace air defense systems.
4. Fujairah has already been struck repeatedly since this conflict kicked off.
5. The oil pipeline capacity from the 'west' side of the UAE to Fujairah is nowhere near enough to meet demand, even if the port and oil terminal were considered totally safe by ship owners and cargo owners, which it isn't.
They already did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habshan%E2%80%93Fujairah_oil_p...
But it obviously wasn't designed to carry all the oil going through the Strait.
It should be pointed out that facilities connected to this pipeline were targeted during the conflict.
Imagine thinking this was a good idea when you cut your ribbon after all that money and effort and then a ~$500 drone flies over and with one explosion has it leaking.
Do you think people are dumb? Obviously beneficial and easy actions that no one has taken rarely exist in the real world. You're basically suggesting the people actually there who have a better view than you are profoundly stupid.
Oil pipelines are underground. The small proportions of above-ground sections were indeed targeted in this recent conflict but in war-prone areas so is the rest of your oil infrastructure including ships at sea and the ground based facilities can be fortified and defended.
Is it vulnerable to the same sort of asymmetric attack, yes or no?
Can the system run if those above ground areas are destroyed? Of course hypothetically they can be defended. Just like hypothetically a few drones should not be able to shut the world's most powerful navy out of the strait.
In reality we know the real answer lies in an admission of your answer. The best defense is electing governments which will not wantonly engage in armed conflicts.
If this was obvious to some random guy like me at least two months ago [1][2] without access to intelligence community information and military assessments then this should surprise absolutely no one in the administration. I said then and have been vindicated (IMHO): this will go down as the largest strategic blunder in US history. It's also going to reshape the region away from US influence because of the hollowness of US security guarantees. The GCC are going to have to deal with Iran as a fellow oil-producing nation. A big loser here is the UAE and I'm not sure that Dubai ever recovers.
Before all of this, Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz was a theory that was never tested. Traffic passed freely. But a war was forced upon them by the US and Israel so if any of these countries (or anyone else for that matter) is unhappy at the outcome, you know where to point the finger.
One irony in all this is that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea would guarantee free transit passage through territorial waters like the Strait of Hormuz. Iran isn't a signatory. The ironic part is that the United States isn't either.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944212
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47937691
People used to jokingly say that the way to prosperity is for the U.S. to defeat you in a war. Soon people will jokingly say the way to prosperity is for you to defeat the U.S. in a war. The sequel to The Mouse that Roared is The Lion that Squeaked.
> you know where to point the finger.
Greenland, Cuba, or Canada?
Some HNers will unironically blame the Democrats.
Maybe I'm misreading this. Tone and particularly sarcasm can be lost in text. But I think that comment you're responding to was making fun of the administration.
One thing this administration is not known for is taking accountability and admitting they made a massive error. No, it'll be someone else's fault so we'll move on to whoever the next bogeyman is. And it can't be China because the US just objectively lost a war with Iran. You think we're going to win a war with China? No. What we really need is a tune-up fight. A bit like how Reagan invaded Grenada two days after the Beiruit bombing that ultimately led to US withdrawal from Lebanon.
This was basically soothing our hurt feelings by using the US miltiary, the largest in the world, to invade a Sandals resort.
I don’t understand why we’re calling it insurance? Does it pay out if something bad happens?
It’s called a protection racket. If you’re insured then the you are assured nothing bad will happen.
Yes, I don’t understand why we are accepting the iranian regimes use of the word
Al Capone couldn't have come up with a more "attractive" insurance plan himself.
"Pay us and we won't fuck your shit up" is the history of civilization
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47200879
I wonder what happened to the Iranian buddies? So many HN accounts whose Iranian friends were all supposedly celebrating the US-Israeli bombings of their country of origin. Are they still cheering?
Those that lived in Iran were executed by Iran.
So much winning.
Look at the doc (from Iran), the things covered by the “insurance” have only ever happened (in the straight) due to Iran.
Well, gosh! You're right, that's just not fair! We should make sure the relevant authority figures pass judgement or something to make them stop.
Folks, this is what happens when you lose a war. You have to pay the bad guys to win the war in a more comfortable way for you.
Iran knows this is a protection racket. They don't care. What're we gonna do about it? Bomb them again?
lol. I’m not pro-Iran or pro-maga. I was going to make a mafia reference but wanted to stay neutral
LMAO they're learning how to do legally defensible racketeering the way US insurance companies do, very smart.
Did Iran just rediscover the protection racket?
ART OF THE DEAL
Some real 5 dimensional chess being played here
Were straits not doing insurance at all before? Would have thought that all straits were charging for it after the Ever Given disaster. The strategy can’t permanently be “wait for the EU or US to fix it in a week as worldwide markets crash”.
The Ever Given was stuck in the Suez Canal.
Narrowest width:
- Strait of Hormuz (33 km)
- Bab-el-Mandeb (26 km)
- Strait of Gibraltar (13 km)
- Strait of Malacca (2.8 km)
- Bosphorus (700 m)
- Suez Canal (205 m) <- Ever Given
- Panama Canal (55 m)
No I understand that the Suez Canal is unique but there are other ways one ship can blow it for everyone. Dumped toxic cargo for one.
And here comes the hell of unnoticed collateral effects
For example. Are the bombs throw over Iran, cancelling the monsoon rains in several states of India?
> "After an encouraging start to the SW monsoon season, India is now witnessing a prolonged pause in its advance, raising concerns over rainfall deficits, soaring temperatures and water shortages in some states. (source: Bussiness Standard)"
https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/monsoon-in-indi...
Also: "(Without rains) The stock of drinking water in the State of Goa can last about one month".
It seems that all those clouds are being pushed directly offshore to release into the ocean.
Betteridge’s law strikes again. (I came close to finishing that sentence with a question mark. Oh the irony)
More seriously, I looked at the article you linked. It talks about lots if complex climate stuff that I don’t understand. I don’t think it mentions bombs as a cause. Or the war. Please show your receipts.
Lets just say that Insurance companies near the place will need to worry about much more than the Strait of Hormuz in 2026
> It talks about complex climate stuff that I don’t understand.
Not your fault. The biosphere is a extremely complex system. We pay researchers for spending their lives studying the details of the whole picture at a fine grain level so we can react on time, lets go ...
[error 404: Scientist not found. Data deleted. DOGE was here]
Hum, though luck, the best expert advice can't work when everybody is anti-science. Maybe nobody will be able to prove this pretty obvious effect before the damage. A hint: hot air goes up, like insurance costs will.
"such a good ship, shame if anything happened to it"
Incredible that Iran is victorious (so far).
War is one way of forcing political will on another. The US military executed nearly flawlessly yet US leadership doesn't want to pay the cost of defeating Iran by force.
Why even have this military if anything that affects the market makes the US cower in fear?
> The US military executed nearly flawlessly
Did they? They
- Started the war off by (to all appearances accidentally) bombing a girls elementary school
- Had an aircraft carrier spontaneously catch fire via laundry - forcing it to go for repairs mid war
- Lost a bunch of very expensive aircraft, and some (though not very many per airframe) soldiers with them
- Proved that the F-35s stealth capabilities aren't quite what they were hyped up to be by having one hit by a guided missile
And on the strategic objectives front (where, to be fair, they were given impossible tasks)
- Killed the person they were hoping to install as the new head of state
- Didn't manage to destroy Iran's missile launch capability
- Didn't manage to secure the straight of hormuz
- Didn't manage to defend their own bases against missile attacks, instead fleeing to hotels
on that last one: don't americans talk a lot of shit about hamas using residential areas as cover? what, pray tell, is cohousing your military with civilian in hotels?
Also..
* USA (or Israel really) started this war on their own terms at a time of their choosing. But they werent prepared at all.
* Incredibly valuable things like THAAD radars (like $1B per unit) were taken out by $1000 drones.. We've all seen the war in Ukraine, we all know Iran makes Shahed drones. US seemed to be completely unprepared for this.
* US was using $1M pac 3 patriot missiles to shoot down $1000 drones, utterly failing the shot exchange problem. Also US has run down its stockpiles of many missiles to 50% or less. It will take 3 or 4 years to return many items to acceptable levels, and wont be able sell any either, leaving customers seeking alternatives.
* Clear miscoordination and lack of clarity between US and allies. Like no-one really knew what was happening or why, leading to stuff like the ghost of Kuwait.
Classic trump regieme action. No-one competent in the room. Just impulsively doing random shit each day with no strategy or understanding.
> Classic trump regieme action. No-one competent in the room. Just impulsively doing random shit each day with no strategy or understanding.
It has echoes of LBJ and later Nixon trying to control a massive conflict from thousands of miles a way, based mostly on vibes.
Vibes? There's a fallacy named after McNamara trying to break it down to numerical metrics. Vibes probably would've served them better.
I think they had much more intelligence and competence back then, even if they were wrong. Now it's stupidity and incompetence on top of being wrong.
> The US military executed nearly flawlessly
The US military exhibited numerous flaws. To cover numerous flaws not yet covered by other replies:
* Required the deployment of assets beyond their useful operational capability (which caused the aircraft carrier to catch fire).
* Demonstrated that their targeting list is not only based on outdated information, but failed to update that information when informed it was outdated (which led to the bombing of the elementary school).
* Failed to anticipate literally the one military contingency everyone expected Iran to do--close the strait. Hell, even after it was clear that was happened and everyone was screaming "what are you going to do about it?" the answer was, shockingly "absolutely nothing."
* Failed to adequately secure supply lines to ensure that military units in the area have sufficient food. This is literally logistics 101 stuff.
* Defined operational success criteria not based on results achieved but on effort spent--in other words, how many bombs you launched rather than whether or not the targets you wanted destroyed were destroyed.
* Definitely several C2 issues we're not entirely privy to, given the midair collision that cost a tanker, and the loss of an AWACS unit.
The strategic issues are even more myriad, but since strategy is supposed to be largely a civilian, not military, decision, it's not really the military's fault. Except I will note that a lot of civilians in this field do come from ex-military background, and there does seem to be a major recurring problem that CENTCOM is producing a lot of people with really bad strategic judgement that is partially responsible for this debacle in the first place. Really to the point that we should consider blackballing everyone from CENTCOM from ever having a military or civilian defense job of importance ever again.
You missed the biggest one
Us military has had active demonstrations of the importance of advanced drone munitions FOR TEN YEARS NOW and completely dropped the ball.
It is clear that an organizational level the US military does not have infantry level short and medium-range drone capability like Ukraine does, and more importantly, like all of our enemies do.
It's not just a matter of the US military needing to do a bunch a weapons designs. Procurement politics can't close the drone capability gap.
Because the fundamental capability is cheap and flexible, whereas the entire Pentagon weapons procurement is big, expensive and inflexible
The US Marines are now functionally ineffective. The US cannot execute a marine invasion in the current military capabilities, not without taking publicly untenable losses
The US Navy still has deep water capability and can still exert strategic influence, but at a tactical level, which is in near shore/littoral arenas, they are now useless, and the political procurement process to make weapons to make them relevant again is the same problem. The infantry level one does, but it's even bigger and has even more organizational resistance
I disagree.
For all of Iran's supposed mastery of drone warfare, do note that the damage those drones have done to the US military is... essentially nil. No ships have been sunk; no aircraft have been lost. There have been some lives lost due to a drone attack on a facility troops were staying area, but at first read, I'm going to chalk that up more to the US military generally not planning for Iran to respond at all to a bombing raid rather than drones per se being particularly effective. Where the drones have been effective have been as a form of precision bombing--exactly the same kind of missions the US military has achieved with its regular air forces, albeit at a considerably greater distance from its homeland than any drone-based force has been able to achieve.
I think many people are way too quick to point to drone warfare as the obvious future of warfare, without considering the environment in which wars operate and how it might play out differently for different combatants. The US has a general assumption of complete and total air superiority in its conflicts--and the last time it didn't have that was over 70 years ago--and the number of countries that can meaningfully contest US air superiority is unknown but very few. The lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War--a conflict where neither side has air superiority--are thus somewhat limited for a US conflict against most of its enemies. (Although I do agree that the US military is too sanguine about not learning from the Russo-Ukrainian War).
USAF did lose an AWACS plane to a drone attack. Why? It was out in the open. I would think some minimal concealment / camouflage would have made an easy drone target into an impossible one. Same with the early warning radars that were destroyed; someone was asleep in command not posturing these systems such that they were at least slightly harder to find and hit.
Overall, the drones were militarily a bunch of mosquito's. None of the US allies 'enjoyed' having civilian targets hit by the Iranian drones, but the military impact was minor at best.
Unless you want to put boots on the ground, you send missiles and drop bombs.
The Iranian drones would have been a lot more of a problem if they were harassing ground troops on the way to Tehran.
(does the US need counter drone systems? yes, absolutely. is air superiority dead? not at all)
Yes, the US military is not prepared for modern war.
The cost of defeating Iran military (in enough detail to stop them from firing rockets at ships or doing insurgency harassment etc) would probably take years, so honestly the whole operation was unrealistic from the outset without trying to install a favored successor.
It doesn't help that they nearly blew up the favored successor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/politics/iran-israel-u...
> Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.
Is this really just about the market? I imagine it's also about a ton of body bags coming back just around the midterms. Because that will happen in a ground war.
There was never a buildup of even 1/50th of the ground forces that would have been required to occupy the major military sites, industrial sites and large cities (nevermind attempt to control the countryside). The buildup to the 2003 Iraq War started 12+ months in advance with thousands of vehicles, cargo containers, equipment and 150,000+ guys collecting in bases in Kuwait.
Also worth noting that Iran is generally a bigger and richer country than Iraq, whichever timeframe you look at.
To summarize in rough numbers:
* 2x the population (today)
* 3x the land area (today, but also probably back then)
* 7x the relative wealth (compared to Iraq-2002, using US GDP across time as a shared baseline)
I'm sure the US military has a much better statistical analysis... and I'm also sure it was ignored by the commander-in-chief.
Iran is also considerably more mountainous than Iraq, if one looks at a topo map of Iraq and examines all the generally 'flat, somewhere generally near the Euphrates' area vs a population density map in people per square km. Yeah there's more complicated terrain in the northern part of the country, but nowhere on the size/scale of what exists in Iran.
> War is one way of forcing political will on another
War is politics by other means (Clausewitz).
> pay the cost of defeating Iran by force.
And how much do you think that cost would be? What are we at now? $139B to $1T in long term costs baked in so far.
> > Why even have this military if anything that affects the market makes the US cower in fear?
First of all the chain of those cowering in fear begins with the the actors around ship transit , meaning the owners but also the seamen , they don't want to cross if there is a > 5% chance of being hit . And the seamen are actually being forced to accept such risk, they signed up for something else entirely, their risk preference would be around 0.0% because these days nobody dies at sea anymore.
Without Hormuz the world runs out of oil and that is a much bigger problem than just stock market going down
With the mines and drones and asymmetric warfare you'd need to conquer the entirety of Iran alley by alley and mountain by mountain to secure the strait for a risk tolerance in line with the aforementioned 5%
This war was lost when the U.S. wasn't ready to intervene during the week of popular uprise against the regime, had the intervention happened back then , maybe it could have been possible to overthrow the Ayatollah system and reinstall the Shah (who btw was no Saint either)
John Mearsheimer has called this right from the first day, he said that Iran 'holds all the cards' and he's been right on everything down to a T (no pun intended) [0]
It has been an acrobatic adventure in the Middle East with lots of expenses and very little human losses to follow the 'Greater Israel' ambition of Israel and Bibi. But we must not forget that we killed their Supreme Leader and Religious Leader all wrapped in one , they will not let this slide and with the asymmetric war and warfare this Administration has exposed itself to potentially another 9/11 that would at that point force a ground war with lots of victims.
[0]http://youtube.com/watch?v=DBOVT0UdHXg
Iran calls notwithstanding, Mearsheimer is a complete clown with regard to Ukraine calls
2014 - Claimed Putin had no interest in annexing large parts of Ukraine, conquering it, or pursuing regime change
Feb 2022 - Putin had “no intention of invading Ukraine” in the sense of large-scale conquest (days before the invasion)
June 2022 - “There is no evidence in the public record that Putin was contemplating, much less intending to put an end to Ukraine as an independent state… Putin was not interested in making Ukraine a part of Russia… the Russians pursued a limited aims strategy”
Repeated claim (2014–2022): Putin is a rational actor who understands the costs and would not pursue maximalist territorial or imperial goals in Ukraine
Well, you know, as crude as it may sound, new war everybody starts from 0 with their prediction score