Number 1 reason why I want to see the United States of America and its very loud citizens get a taste of humble pie in this self-inflicted crisis of idiocy with global ramifications.
Even when discussing a war that's obviously gone out of hand with no easy resolution in right, there's still this air, this attitude from American commenters that somehow the might and brilliance of the US military will prevail in the end and they can restore their position as leaders of the free world. Meanwhile the rest of the world has waited 50 years for this day.
Let me have a little schadenfreude with my €2.20+ litre of petrol.
There aren't a lot of alternatives - the amount of mass killing going on right now is unusually high. People can't spend all day frothing with moral outrage at the horror of it all. If something is routine there isn't much of an alternative than to discuss it as routine.
This article is actually unusually good, I wouldn't be surprised if the site was generally anti-war. It isn't unusual for the level of analysis to be "we're the in-group, we're morally right, they're the out-group, we can't imagine they're competent, lets kill them it'll be easy". The moment people start doing serious analysis they become well-armed pacifists. As a case study; this war is part of a trend of the US hurting itself in aid of ... nothing useful for the US. The only silver lining is I don't see the Trump presidency surviving this and that might be a lesson to the next guy about trying to start fights.
It’s really quite amazing how the US went in without seemingly an iota of planning beyond “kill ayatollah for regime change”, but at this rate we will see US regime change before Iranian.
The US public discourse is so dehumanized today that anyone who is not "with them" is literally not a human anymore. Even within the country itself "the leftards" are considered an obstacle which can be removed if only enough force is applied.
Sending armed agents at protesters is seen as being the same thing as sending pest control to clear out beaver dams on the creek. Nobody cares what the beavers think, they are not human, they do not have feelings. They are simply a menace to be dealth with.
The supporters of imperialism all about nonviolent protest and democratic principles if it seems feasible it could bring about US foreign policy goals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47111067
Or, if an anonymous and uncorroborated source claims tens of thousands of said protestors were allegedly massacred.
If it doesn't, and the strategy now involves blowing up desalinization plants ( https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-threat-desalination-pl... ) and invoking a humanitarian crisis on the level of a nuclear catastrophe, well... then they're a bit less concerned about human rights.
At the heart of this is the fact that America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale.
High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.
It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.
> We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America
I think the Ukranians are still unimpressed with the withdrawal of US support, especially from the shells which were being manufactured in the US (now moved to Rheinmetall), and the de-sanctioning of Russian oil: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko
Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict.
It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
We suck at ultra-heavy industry that outputs commodities. We're great at light industry, or specialised heavy industry, which includes a lot of electronics. You're correct on inflexibility.
Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is?
>We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
The soviet union collapsed as a result of military overspending and massive supply chain corruption in an attempt to keep up with an opponent with lower levels of corruption and a far more powerful industrial base.
Which is to say, inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons while showering them with cash would signal that that Christmas came early for Putin.
Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads.
The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.
> inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons
Ukraine is a massive weapons manufacturer. It's a small country holding Russia's entire military-industrial complex at bay. We have a lot to learn from them, even if it's just tactics and industrial organisation. And those lessons don't only apply to fighting pisspot dictatorships like Putin's.
Sorry, at the heart of this is that the Commander in Chief and Secretary of War are idiots. It's not clear how any of this situation would be any different if America had a dramatically higher production capacity.
Clausewitz would say they are the same: the stupid war is the continuation of stupid politics by other means. The objectives are unclear, which prevents them being achieved.
is china helping ukraine also? The real "force multiplier" is basically the same as it was 100 years ago: fancy advanced tech works great to clear large, unoccupied spaces with no terrain costs; it still won't go into a jungle, climbmountains or fight in the streats.
Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon.
So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land.
America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.
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 dynamics has taken place will influence U.S. operations.
> this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones
Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)
If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space.
The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
> If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more
This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world.
> change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles
It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon.
It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now.
> the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised
Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
Both can be true - carriers and traditional air force are not obsolete but also western armies are unprepared to deal with the threat posed by a large number of cheap drones which can quickly deplete traditional air defense (based on SAM systems).
Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.
> carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles
Where? When?
> if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone
What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying.
Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger.
The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach.
Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
Not every war can be fought from air, there needs to be soldiers on the ground.
In fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground.
But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.
The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters.
We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight.
And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from.
Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place.
There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea.
Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible.
That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider.
And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf?
The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing.
It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.
> The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country
If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea,
> If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles
If you want to secure the entire Strait, sure. My understanding is you'd only seek to hold the area around the Musandam Peninsula, along with a couple of the islands near it.
At some point, there's going to be a dumbenough general to try to paratrooper their way in. They've spent the past year trying to cull "dysloyal" troops, so at some point, the delusion will surface is an absurdly dumb attempt.
US forces are not partisan and not culled, they're mostly the same entity they were last year, but with a few Generals asked to retire.
(Edit: highly professional I might add. There are quirks, and obvious hints of 'nationalist bias' - but that's to be expected. They are not the 'cultural problem' we see on the news - at least not for now. They lean 'normal')
The current Joint Chiefs is a bit obsequious but he's not crazy.
These are very sane people, for the most part.
They may be pressed to do something risky, like land troops at Kharg island, but not completely suicidal.
That 'risk' may entail getting a number of soldiers captured, but that's not on the extreme side of military failure, it's mostly geopolitical failure. It would certainly end DJT as a popular movement.
Having a ship hit, or a few soldiers captured - and this sounds morose - is normal. That's why they exist. It's the political fallout that's deadly.
They won't do anything to crazy. The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that. It's very unpopular and DJT has populist instinct as well - he's trying to 'find a way out'.
There was an article somewhere a few days ago, where the author raised the question: Why buy tanks in a world of drone warfare. Something like that. I see this as much the same "problem". Drones can't really take or hold territory, they can only deny access to it. At some point you need people and armoured vehicles on the ground.
The US is facing the same issue in Iran. You can bomb all you like, but a bomber, like a drone, can't hold land. Iran can launch drones and missiles towards the Strait of Hormuz from the entire country, denying anyone access, but also without being able to hold it.
Because they went in without a plan, or even a goal really, the US administration denied itself, and everyone else, access to the strait. The military leadership probably knew this. If not they could have asked Ukraine if this was a sound idea, given their knowledge and experience with Iranian drone technology.
The part that makes the Strait weird is no belligerent wants it entirely closed. (Maybe Israel.) Iran wants to export. And America wants exports. So you get this weird stalemate where America doesn’t want to actually blockade Iran, while Iran seems to do just enough to keep America from actually shutting the Strait.
The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes.
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
Brightest minds of US were too focused on displaying ads and making teenagers addicted to tik tokies-like stuff instead of working security, defense, etc
You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :)
The US no longer uses its army for defense. Nobody in their immediate region dares attack them, they're too powerful ("Godzilla", in the words of John Mearsheimer). All the wars that the US has fought since WWII are nothing to do with defense. Just look at the Wikipedia article on "power projection":
The leader image is ... a US aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz). That's what the US uses its military power for, to influence events in lands far, far away from its territory.
But, now, tell me which one of the many wars that the US has fought in after WWII did not end in disaster. Afghanistan? Iraq? Korea?
There was a meme doing the rounds the other day: "Name a character who can defeat Captain America". The answer being "Captain Vietnam". The US has faced humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat while bringing death and destruction and immeasurable misery to millions around the world.
That is what HN users seem to have an "anti" sentiment for. If you watch the news you'll be able to tell that this goes far beyond HN. The whole of US society seems to be extremely tired with those "forever wars", those senseless excursions to faraway lands, that not only do not secure US interests but turn world opinion more and more against the US. Even the US' closest allies now fear the US: vide Greenland. Anyone with more than a video game or comic book understanding of how the real world works would do well to be concerned.
Edit: also from EU, btw. Greek but living in the UK.
That tragedy of the Maven targeting system is very much something that could have been optimized away, so no! Ad-servers optimizing minds could have been better employed on that project. (nothing to do with Java's Maven, look it up)
Someone told me: "Think! Who were these girls' parents..." and that's BS it was really a big senseless mistake, now we're clearly in Vendettastan
This has definitely nothing to do with the subject at hand.
US Forces and Defence Complex have most of the talent they need.
Even with prevailing capabilities in many areas, it's not possible to do most things. Armies are not 'magic' - we're lulled into a false sense of understanding of capabilities by focusing to much on 'special forces' and other kinds of operations.
What makes you think what the US, most probably at the behest of occupiers of Palestine, is going to do wonders for sentiment of the general public towards the US military industry? The anti-military sentiment is justified and will probably grow as more people wake up to the terrorising and dual faced nature of the US.
Would those "brightest minds" want to work for the current US government? Even if they did out of patriotism to the country, the Trump administration would have pushed them out by now and replaced with yes-men.
The people I know leaving that sector have been steadily leaving for years due to the day to day bullshit/internal politics and poor leadership that they have to put up with, not the pay nor current administration.
Right but if you're a lifelong gov worker you are probably used to the pay, and it's hard to switch from gov work to startups or big tech (at least, I would see it as a thing to question). Whereas the GGP talks about people switching from the private sector (adtech, etc.) to public.
The first thing they are going to see is the salary and run a mile. That's partly why Palantir 'works'; they pay tech salaries and have a tech culture, but do gov work. Booz Allen et al were less advanced prototypes of that as well.
You aren't allowed to talk about it anymore, and ending it didn't have any effect other than improving the quality of people employed by our institutions.
I don't get that "Strait" discussion. Where does the Strait begin and end? If somehow the US Navy "opens" the Strait, what stops Iran to attack every ship moving in the direction of the Strait? Where does the "protection zone" start and end?
The U.S. can't win this war. John Kiriakou did a nice analysis on this on his recent podcasts. "Iran just has to prolong the war and survive it to win". Trump on the other hand needs a decisive win fast, or the economic and political fallout will be too big. As long as Iran can launch cheap drones and keep a small but steady pressure there is just no path out of this for the U.S. except to go home.
> This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is "attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake." And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Can they do that: yes, keep Hormuz shut until much closer to November, and "the economic and political fallout will be too big."
While it can very well be true, I wonder if we don't exagerate the will of the iranian regime and its ablity in the current time to think this far ahead. I see them more in survival mode, I'm not sure they fight for future deterence, maybe the goals align currently but seems to me to be happenstance. They seem resilient but I wonder how much they would be close of falling. Of course, I wouldn't have done this war, and I certainly would stop it now.
We can't bomb our way out of the mess we bombed our way into.
Carpet bombing wouldn't work. Neither would taking out water and power infrastructure as JumpCrisscross suggested elsewhere. I think it should be very clear to everyone watching that the Iranian regime has been preparing for this a long time. And they're OK with this being a war of attrition. To quote the regime's missives, "you will drown in our blood."
> “Mosaic defence” is an Iranian military concept most closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly under former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, who led the force from 2007 to 2019.
>
> The idea is to organise the state’s defensive structure into multiple regional and semi-independent layers instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that could be paralysed by a decapitation strike.
>
> Under this model, the IRGC, the Basij, regular army units, missile forces, naval assets and local command structures form parts of a distributed system. If one part is hit, others keep functioning. If senior leaders are killed, the chain does not collapse. If communications are severed, local units still retain the authority and capacity to act.
Topographically, Iran is mostly mountains with a little bit of flat land. Those mountains are most likely riddled with tunnels that have food, water, drones and missiles. If the US wants to re-open that strait, soldiers would have to fight tunnel by tunnel, inch by inch over a region designed for ambushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/File:...
The US can and will win at the end, but like the Iranians said themselves, their goal isn't to win; it's to outlast us. They're willing and capable of fighting to the last person. The US and the global economy on the other hand, isn't. Because there isn't an end to fight for.
None of this was (apparently) necessary.
I was amazed to hear this, but apparently, Iranian diplomats handed an American delegation at Geneva a compromise on the nuclear issue that would re-instate the JCPOA. The negotiators didn't understand what they'd been handed over, https://youtu.be/G3uGYpPJEGM?t=265
And so they proceeded to bomb Iran.
The Iranians offered a compromise, it was rejected by people who didn't understand it, and then they broke diplomatic good faith.
Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. More horrible, possibly, than taking out the power and water infrastructure.
We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.
Trump casually talks about destroying the energy infrastructure, power plants, desalination plants etc. This is one of the most controversial things that the Russians do in Ukraine - attack the grid when it's cold to try and freeze people to death. To willingly deprive a country of 100,000,000 people of water and power coming into summer would surely be a war-crime.
Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.
My Iranian ex colleague shares very interesting opinion. They trained during his army time to blow everything in the region up. So if things escalate badly the oil and gas importing countries will stay with a fraction of needed oil and gas for years. There is no backup infrastructure anywhere in the world. It will take years to rebuild the infrastructure. It will destroy world’s economy better than nukes.
Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran.
And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.
When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.
The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.
The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.
I'm always perturbed to see people talk of mass killings so casually
Number 1 reason why I want to see the United States of America and its very loud citizens get a taste of humble pie in this self-inflicted crisis of idiocy with global ramifications.
Even when discussing a war that's obviously gone out of hand with no easy resolution in right, there's still this air, this attitude from American commenters that somehow the might and brilliance of the US military will prevail in the end and they can restore their position as leaders of the free world. Meanwhile the rest of the world has waited 50 years for this day.
Let me have a little schadenfreude with my €2.20+ litre of petrol.
> “…getting blown to smithereens…”
Looney Tunes language like this projects an aura of un-reality further in the article, which I like even less.
> perturbed to see people talk of mass killings so casually
I'm almost perturbed to not see it discussed at all. What are the casualty estimates of blasting open the Strait?
There aren't a lot of alternatives - the amount of mass killing going on right now is unusually high. People can't spend all day frothing with moral outrage at the horror of it all. If something is routine there isn't much of an alternative than to discuss it as routine.
This article is actually unusually good, I wouldn't be surprised if the site was generally anti-war. It isn't unusual for the level of analysis to be "we're the in-group, we're morally right, they're the out-group, we can't imagine they're competent, lets kill them it'll be easy". The moment people start doing serious analysis they become well-armed pacifists. As a case study; this war is part of a trend of the US hurting itself in aid of ... nothing useful for the US. The only silver lining is I don't see the Trump presidency surviving this and that might be a lesson to the next guy about trying to start fights.
It’s really quite amazing how the US went in without seemingly an iota of planning beyond “kill ayatollah for regime change”, but at this rate we will see US regime change before Iranian.
The US public discourse is so dehumanized today that anyone who is not "with them" is literally not a human anymore. Even within the country itself "the leftards" are considered an obstacle which can be removed if only enough force is applied.
Sending armed agents at protesters is seen as being the same thing as sending pest control to clear out beaver dams on the creek. Nobody cares what the beavers think, they are not human, they do not have feelings. They are simply a menace to be dealth with.
The supporters of imperialism all about nonviolent protest and democratic principles if it seems feasible it could bring about US foreign policy goals: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47111067
Or, if an anonymous and uncorroborated source claims tens of thousands of said protestors were allegedly massacred.
If it doesn't, and the strategy now involves blowing up desalinization plants ( https://apnews.com/article/trump-iran-threat-desalination-pl... ) and invoking a humanitarian crisis on the level of a nuclear catastrophe, well... then they're a bit less concerned about human rights.
> Even within the country itself "the leftards" are considered an obstacle which can be removed if only enough force is applied.
You assert this, but take a closer look at the details.
The conservatives, when they protest (Tea Parties) leave public spaces in fine shape.
Others, not so much.
> The conservatives, when they protest (Tea Parties) leave public spaces in fine shape
We're just skipping Charlottesville and the Capitol? We have idiots on both of our fringes. But only one of them is in power right now.
> The conservatives, when they protest (Tea Parties) leave public spaces in fine shape.
As long as you ignore the feces smeared on the walls and the injured police.
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How long will it take in your opinion for the concentration camps (like CECOT) to be converted to Nazi-style death camps?
Didn't you read the URL?
It's not mass killing, it's statecraft.
It's not casual, it's responsible.
James Cameron in Avatar: Fire and Ash makes fun of these Big Picture guys (so called ThinkTank people) towards the end.
"Responsible Statecraft" they call themselves.
At the heart of this is the fact that America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale.
High tech interceptors and missiles and aircraft carriers are great, but with China's help these are outnumbered by three (soon to be four) orders of magnitude.
It's unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes, with not much in between.
> America has lost the capability to manufacture anything at scale
We make plenty of stuff at scale. We just haven’t designed any of military around it since WWII.
> unclear if we can do much other than threaten sanctions and nukes
We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
> We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America
I think the Ukranians are still unimpressed with the withdrawal of US support, especially from the shells which were being manufactured in the US (now moved to Rheinmetall), and the de-sanctioning of Russian oil: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko
"We make plenty of stuff at scale."
Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict.
It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
We suck at ultra-heavy industry that outputs commodities. We're great at light industry, or specialised heavy industry, which includes a lot of electronics. You're correct on inflexibility.
Can you give some specific examples of what light industry we are great at?
Pharmaceuticals, medical devices and craft food and beverage products come to mind. Guns and ammo, too.
> We make plenty of stuff at scale
Maybe this video of a rather famous YouTuber trying to manufacture something as simple as a grill scrubber with a US supply chain would help you understand how bad it is?
https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY
>We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
The soviet union collapsed as a result of military overspending and massive supply chain corruption in an attempt to keep up with an opponent with lower levels of corruption and a far more powerful industrial base.
Which is to say, inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons while showering them with cash would signal that that Christmas came early for Putin.
Reality of course is the other way around: the US defense industry gets to build gold toilets (for the White House ballroom built on the ruins of the East Wing), while the Ukranians absolutely must build stuff that works and is cheap or they get a missile on their heads.
The US survived spending a trillion dollars to achieve very little in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm sure they'll survive spending another trillion over a decade to achieve nothing in Iran other than hundreds of thousands dead.
> inviting the gold toilet brigade from Ukraine to come and build our weapons
Ukraine is a massive weapons manufacturer. It's a small country holding Russia's entire military-industrial complex at bay. We have a lot to learn from them, even if it's just tactics and industrial organisation. And those lessons don't only apply to fighting pisspot dictatorships like Putin's.
> We could learn from our allies in Ukraine. Give them capital and manufacturing bases in America.
But Putin would not like that! /s
Sorry, at the heart of this is that the Commander in Chief and Secretary of War are idiots. It's not clear how any of this situation would be any different if America had a dramatically higher production capacity.
These are orthogonal problems.
Getting into this war was stupid.
Being unable to win it is also pretty bad.
Clausewitz would say they are the same: the stupid war is the continuation of stupid politics by other means. The objectives are unclear, which prevents them being achieved.
is china helping ukraine also? The real "force multiplier" is basically the same as it was 100 years ago: fancy advanced tech works great to clear large, unoccupied spaces with no terrain costs; it still won't go into a jungle, climbmountains or fight in the streats.
Whats compounding existing reality, is how cheap it is to use commercial tech from any of these manufacturing hubs, china included, and turn it into a small but persistent offensive weapon.
So now Americas got billions of dollars worth of ammo up agains millions of dollars worth of fodder, and that won't clear the way to controlling a large, well defended plot of land.
America's leaders are drunk and high on their own propaganda, even while Ukraine has demonstrated just how useless the old, bulky and costly tech is.
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 dynamics has taken place will influence U.S. operations.
> this shift in carrier-based projection of power in the era of low-cost drones
Nothing in this war has suggested carriers are obsolete. A carrier that launches drones and fields an anti-drone strike group would be amazing. We don’t have that. (And even what we do have is great in the carrier department, it’s given us air parity to superiority from way offshore.)
If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more, given they obviously have a lot more space.
The change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles. The cost of a “good enough” drone and missile is now so low that opponents of the US can simply build the thing faster than the US can build and deliver them. In effect the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised.
> If a carrier can launch fields of drones and missiles, then whatever land mass your attacking can launch more
This is also true of airplanes. The point is you choose where you launch your drones from anywhere in the world.
> change in dynamic here isn’t a function of carriers or their abilities. It’s a change in the cost of drones and missiles
It's a return to battleship economics. Except instead of direct fire from and onto shores, you have indirect fire via drones. Unlike shells, however, we have anti-drone capabilities on the horizon.
It's silly to assume the current instability will persist for more than a few years. If the U.S. were paying any attention to Ukraine, it shouldn't have persisted until even now.
> the technological advantage is that carriers represented for a long time has been completely neutralised
Really not seeing the argument. Again, being able to build and launch and being able to field drones–alongside other weapons–is night and day. (Note that all of these arguments were made when missiles first dawned, too. Drones are, in many respects, a missile for area denial.)
Both can be true - carriers and traditional air force are not obsolete but also western armies are unprepared to deal with the threat posed by a large number of cheap drones which can quickly deplete traditional air defense (based on SAM systems).
Lol carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles, this now means a multi billion dollar ship can and will be destroyed by cheap drones if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone.
> carriers were already being overwhelmed by regular missiles
Where? When?
> if it's anywhere near its optimal deployment zone
What are you referring to? The entire modern carrier strike group is architected around using stand-off weapons to clear threats to make way for stand-in weapons. The relevant ranges are what your stand-in bombers can hit without re-fuelling versus with. The era of direct firing from ships passed ages ago–that doesn't make carriers less valuable, just changes their role.
You have any evidence for this? Because low cost drones can't fly very far, are easy to spot with radar, are slow as hell and can be shot down with cheap intercepters, or even lasers as the US is already deploying.
Traditional anti-shipping missiles are a bigger danger.
The optimal deployment zone is far off shore, and there its very hard to reach.
Is your point that you can put a huge carrier literally in the straits?
Not every war can be fought from air, there needs to be soldiers on the ground.
In fight against ISIS, the Iraqi amry, Shia Militias, Kurds and others were ground forces while Allies were in Air. In Afghanistan & Gulf War, US forces were on ground.
But in these "conflict", no party is ready to send ground forces, ground forces to stop the air drones, ship drones etc. So the "blockade" will probably continue.
There is no party even capable of doing it.
The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country, at the same time as there would be 'all out war' with Iran, which would be backed by China and to a lesser extent Russia, and whereupon an invasion would provide them with millions of determined fighters.
We're talking 'Gulf War' scale of operation against a much bigger, more capable country, and of forces willing to fight.
And the US doesn't even have anywhere to do it from.
Assuming a Gulf country would host an invasion force - extremely unlikely - there's no magical way for US to cross the Gulf with large numbers of forces, as we can't get capitol ships in there in the first place.
There's no amphibious capability at the scale necessary on the Arabian Sea.
Literally just the logistics of large scale landings is almost impossible.
That leaves the Kuwait / Iran border, and maybe something a bit wider.
And then fight through the mountains across the Gulf?
The thought is absurd, it's a 'major campaign theatre' - of which US forces were theoretically capable of fighting in two at once, but that's not pragmatic. That's 'wartime economy' kind of thing.
It's possible but unlikely that 10K marines and paratroopers are going to be able to do much, because it's very risky and likely won't accomplish much.
> The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country
If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea,
Iran is the 18th largest country in the world
> If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles
If you want to secure the entire Strait, sure. My understanding is you'd only seek to hold the area around the Musandam Peninsula, along with a couple of the islands near it.
Wow, amazing perspective on proportionality there.
And this was all known for decades. Now everyone pays the price for the US leadership surrounding themselves with spineless yes-men.
At some point, there's going to be a dumbenough general to try to paratrooper their way in. They've spent the past year trying to cull "dysloyal" troops, so at some point, the delusion will surface is an absurdly dumb attempt.
Hard to see it any other way.
US forces are not partisan and not culled, they're mostly the same entity they were last year, but with a few Generals asked to retire.
(Edit: highly professional I might add. There are quirks, and obvious hints of 'nationalist bias' - but that's to be expected. They are not the 'cultural problem' we see on the news - at least not for now. They lean 'normal')
The current Joint Chiefs is a bit obsequious but he's not crazy.
These are very sane people, for the most part.
They may be pressed to do something risky, like land troops at Kharg island, but not completely suicidal.
That 'risk' may entail getting a number of soldiers captured, but that's not on the extreme side of military failure, it's mostly geopolitical failure. It would certainly end DJT as a popular movement.
Having a ship hit, or a few soldiers captured - and this sounds morose - is normal. That's why they exist. It's the political fallout that's deadly.
They won't do anything to crazy. The craziest thing they could do is 'full invasion' and Congress won't allow that. It's very unpopular and DJT has populist instinct as well - he's trying to 'find a way out'.
There was an article somewhere a few days ago, where the author raised the question: Why buy tanks in a world of drone warfare. Something like that. I see this as much the same "problem". Drones can't really take or hold territory, they can only deny access to it. At some point you need people and armoured vehicles on the ground.
The US is facing the same issue in Iran. You can bomb all you like, but a bomber, like a drone, can't hold land. Iran can launch drones and missiles towards the Strait of Hormuz from the entire country, denying anyone access, but also without being able to hold it.
Because they went in without a plan, or even a goal really, the US administration denied itself, and everyone else, access to the strait. The military leadership probably knew this. If not they could have asked Ukraine if this was a sound idea, given their knowledge and experience with Iranian drone technology.
> the "blockade" will probably continue
The part that makes the Strait weird is no belligerent wants it entirely closed. (Maybe Israel.) Iran wants to export. And America wants exports. So you get this weird stalemate where America doesn’t want to actually blockade Iran, while Iran seems to do just enough to keep America from actually shutting the Strait.
> while Iran seems to do just enough to keep America from actually shutting the Strait.
Uhm, why would America shut the strait?
> why would America shut the strait?
To deny Iran oil revenue.
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The problem shown by Ukraine was that large, expensive solutions were not effective when cheap weapons were used. The solution, which will take time, is to recreate some of the cheap defensive solutions that used to be available - guns, radar-bearing weaponry, etc. these are quite boring to the high tech industry, who prefer things like lasers, rail guns, etc. but ww ii showed they worked, and I suspect the approach speed of drones is similar to kamikazes.
There are also fewer ships than in the 80’s, and everything costs too much. F-35’s vs. F16 birds, the gripen argument in Canada or Europe. How to get companies and staff to embrace low tech solutions in a rapid mapper.
Perhaps they can remember history and make planes that support ground operations rather than high tech birds. Having more, slower birds with cannons would help with drone warfare. Armour also helps.
And yeah, selling ads vs more interesting tech solutions was a cliche 10+ years ago.
Brightest minds of US were too focused on displaying ads and making teenagers addicted to tik tokies-like stuff instead of working security, defense, etc
You couldve seen anti militsry industry sentiment on HN for years, which apparently worked for US adversaries, who knows who was behind that propaganda :)
Inb4: im from eu
The US no longer uses its army for defense. Nobody in their immediate region dares attack them, they're too powerful ("Godzilla", in the words of John Mearsheimer). All the wars that the US has fought since WWII are nothing to do with defense. Just look at the Wikipedia article on "power projection":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_projection
The leader image is ... a US aircraft carrier (the USS Nimitz). That's what the US uses its military power for, to influence events in lands far, far away from its territory.
But, now, tell me which one of the many wars that the US has fought in after WWII did not end in disaster. Afghanistan? Iraq? Korea?
There was a meme doing the rounds the other day: "Name a character who can defeat Captain America". The answer being "Captain Vietnam". The US has faced humiliating defeat after humiliating defeat while bringing death and destruction and immeasurable misery to millions around the world.
That is what HN users seem to have an "anti" sentiment for. If you watch the news you'll be able to tell that this goes far beyond HN. The whole of US society seems to be extremely tired with those "forever wars", those senseless excursions to faraway lands, that not only do not secure US interests but turn world opinion more and more against the US. Even the US' closest allies now fear the US: vide Greenland. Anyone with more than a video game or comic book understanding of how the real world works would do well to be concerned.
Edit: also from EU, btw. Greek but living in the UK.
To be fair, it was bright Chinese minds at ByteDance which worked on getting US teenagers addicted to TikTok videos.
Meta, Google did their parts too
I prefer having those minds focused on optimizing ad serving than on optimizing school bombings.
That tragedy of the Maven targeting system is very much something that could have been optimized away, so no! Ad-servers optimizing minds could have been better employed on that project. (nothing to do with Java's Maven, look it up) Someone told me: "Think! Who were these girls' parents..." and that's BS it was really a big senseless mistake, now we're clearly in Vendettastan
I meant intercepting missiles, drones, etc
This has definitely nothing to do with the subject at hand.
US Forces and Defence Complex have most of the talent they need.
Even with prevailing capabilities in many areas, it's not possible to do most things. Armies are not 'magic' - we're lulled into a false sense of understanding of capabilities by focusing to much on 'special forces' and other kinds of operations.
What makes you think what the US, most probably at the behest of occupiers of Palestine, is going to do wonders for sentiment of the general public towards the US military industry? The anti-military sentiment is justified and will probably grow as more people wake up to the terrorising and dual faced nature of the US.
Would those "brightest minds" want to work for the current US government? Even if they did out of patriotism to the country, the Trump administration would have pushed them out by now and replaced with yes-men.
The pay levels seem more of an inherent problem than the political winds.
The people I know leaving that sector have been steadily leaving for years due to the day to day bullshit/internal politics and poor leadership that they have to put up with, not the pay nor current administration.
Right but if you're a lifelong gov worker you are probably used to the pay, and it's hard to switch from gov work to startups or big tech (at least, I would see it as a thing to question). Whereas the GGP talks about people switching from the private sector (adtech, etc.) to public.
The first thing they are going to see is the salary and run a mile. That's partly why Palantir 'works'; they pay tech salaries and have a tech culture, but do gov work. Booz Allen et al were less advanced prototypes of that as well.
The brightest minds were systematically bullied out of position, called DEI hires or accused of random crimes.
They might not have been the best, but lets not pretend we're sending our brightest minds herw.
DEI is over.
You aren't allowed to talk about it anymore, and ending it didn't have any effect other than improving the quality of people employed by our institutions.
What are you talking about? Better missiles dont stop Iran from closing a tiny waterway in their border.
US weapons are pretty damn good for the most part. But trade protection is just not something fancy advanced weapons can solve.
Military planners have known this for a long time.
If anything, if you were serious you would say that the US didnt pay enough tradesmen and technician to build enough of the needed weapons.
> im from eu
Yeah, the ultimate place of military preparedness.
It's not "look I'm doing better than you," it's "please don't repeat our mistakes."
I don't get that "Strait" discussion. Where does the Strait begin and end? If somehow the US Navy "opens" the Strait, what stops Iran to attack every ship moving in the direction of the Strait? Where does the "protection zone" start and end?
> Where does the Strait begin and end?
Practically speaking, the Musandam Peninsula [1]. Open that to the sea and you make everyone except Iraq and Kuwait happy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musandam_Peninsula
at a range where short-range anti-ship missiles can reach ships from Iranian territory.
And boats, amd submerged drones, and mines...
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The U.S. can't win this war. John Kiriakou did a nice analysis on this on his recent podcasts. "Iran just has to prolong the war and survive it to win". Trump on the other hand needs a decisive win fast, or the economic and political fallout will be too big. As long as Iran can launch cheap drones and keep a small but steady pressure there is just no path out of this for the U.S. except to go home.
I have seen the same from other sources
https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/
> This is the second sudden bombing campaign the country has suffered in as many years – they do not want there to be a third next year and a fourth the year after that. But promises not to bomb them don’t mean a whole lot: establishing deterrence here means inflicting quite a lot of pain. In practice, if Iran wants future presidents not to repeat this war, the precedent they want to set is "attacking Iran is a presidency-ending mistake." And to do that, well, they need to end a presidency or at least make clear they could have done.
Can they do that: yes, keep Hormuz shut until much closer to November, and "the economic and political fallout will be too big."
While it can very well be true, I wonder if we don't exagerate the will of the iranian regime and its ablity in the current time to think this far ahead. I see them more in survival mode, I'm not sure they fight for future deterence, maybe the goals align currently but seems to me to be happenstance. They seem resilient but I wonder how much they would be close of falling. Of course, I wouldn't have done this war, and I certainly would stop it now.
What people do to distract the focus from Epstein list.
2nd Epstein war.
Hey, don't knock what works!
We can't bomb our way out of the mess we bombed our way into.
Carpet bombing wouldn't work. Neither would taking out water and power infrastructure as JumpCrisscross suggested elsewhere. I think it should be very clear to everyone watching that the Iranian regime has been preparing for this a long time. And they're OK with this being a war of attrition. To quote the regime's missives, "you will drown in our blood."
To quote, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/10/the-fourth-succ...
Topographically, Iran is mostly mountains with a little bit of flat land. Those mountains are most likely riddled with tunnels that have food, water, drones and missiles. If the US wants to re-open that strait, soldiers would have to fight tunnel by tunnel, inch by inch over a region designed for ambushes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/File:...They've been smuggling in tunnel boring machines over the decades with a little help from North Korea and China, https://jamesmarinero.substack.com/p/irans-underground-missi... and have dug miles of tunnel everywhere, including the city, https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603091729
The US can and will win at the end, but like the Iranians said themselves, their goal isn't to win; it's to outlast us. They're willing and capable of fighting to the last person. The US and the global economy on the other hand, isn't. Because there isn't an end to fight for.
None of this was (apparently) necessary.
I was amazed to hear this, but apparently, Iranian diplomats handed an American delegation at Geneva a compromise on the nuclear issue that would re-instate the JCPOA. The negotiators didn't understand what they'd been handed over, https://youtu.be/G3uGYpPJEGM?t=265
And so they proceeded to bomb Iran.
The Iranians offered a compromise, it was rejected by people who didn't understand it, and then they broke diplomatic good faith.
Could they?
Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. More horrible, possibly, than taking out the power and water infrastructure.
: Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible.
Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam, which is about a fifth of the land area, and, in 1970, half the current population of Iran.
Also, they’ll pack a bigger punch, but I think the USA has way fewer bombers now.
> Could that work? It didn’t end well in Vietnam
We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.
Carpet bombing didn't even break Vietnam. It didn't break WWII Germany either.
Trump casually talks about destroying the energy infrastructure, power plants, desalination plants etc. This is one of the most controversial things that the Russians do in Ukraine - attack the grid when it's cold to try and freeze people to death. To willingly deprive a country of 100,000,000 people of water and power coming into summer would surely be a war-crime.
> This is one of the most controversial things that the Russians do in Ukraine - attack the grid when it's cold to try and freeze people to death
But the Russians have been doing it. Iran may have targeted an Israeli power plant. The precedent, unfortunately, is set.
Iran's deep investment in asymmetric warfare is paying serious dividends. You wouldn't expect a nation that's being bombed day and night, essentially at will, to still hold so many cards. Not only is the US completely incapable of strong-arming the straight open, but the rate of missile and drone attacks out of Iran and its proxies has been accelerating the last few days, as has the rate of successful hits.
My Iranian ex colleague shares very interesting opinion. They trained during his army time to blow everything in the region up. So if things escalate badly the oil and gas importing countries will stay with a fraction of needed oil and gas for years. There is no backup infrastructure anywhere in the world. It will take years to rebuild the infrastructure. It will destroy world’s economy better than nukes.
Since 1979, every US president has known that the US can send a couple of aircraft carriers and bomb the shit out of Iran.
And yet none did. Because they listened to their security chiefs and advisors who would tell them, Iran is a highly complex multiethnic geographically complex country. If you can contain it with diplomacy, that’s preferable.
When listening to “experts” becomes taboo, there will be consequences.
The inhabitants of the Iranian plateau have been the subject of the ire of the military superpower of their era quite a few times. Alexander the Great conquered them and set their capital and their sacred books on fire and yet a mere 70 years later his Hellenic dynasty was gone. They were conquered by the Arabs and were forced to give up their religion but somehow, unlike Egypt and Syria/Lebanon and many other ancient places, these guys somehow kept their language and distinct culture intact. They were decimated (maybe even worse ) by Genghis Khan and followed quickly by Tamerlane and yet, it was their Turco-Mongol rulers who ended up adopting their language and culture.
The inhabitants of this land have deep memory of knowing how to suffer, to endure and to survive. It wasn’t that long ago that from Constantinople to New Delhi, the language of the Imperial Court was Persian.
"Why the the US Navy Can't Blast the Iranians and 'Open' the Strait of Hormuz"
TLDR: not going to put the navy within range of shore attacks + have not yet been able to degrade the Iranian strike capabilites.