From what I can tell, international law requires attacks to be distinct and proportional. Distinct meaning they distinguish between civilian and military targets (you cannot intentionally attack civilian targets), and proportional meaning that the collateral damage to civilians is proportional to the military value of the strike.
This probably doesn’t meet that bar. Cutting off water is bad, but 20k people is a fairly small population for this kind of thing and presumably the US won’t stop them from repairing it (that probably would be a clear cut war crime). Presuming Irans government is functioning, this should be extremely hard for those people but probably not lethal. Trucking water around is an option, even if it’s not great.
At this point, every direct hit on a school or a water source or a charity being accidental collateral damage just doesn't ring true.
Either they've been lying about capabilities (and all the precision strikes were undergone with reckless disregard for human life) or they have the capabilities claimed and are doing exactly what they said they would.
[1] One famous example: https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-ter...
Btw: hitting water reservoirs is only a warcrime if the purpose is to kill (or at least replace) a civilian population from a large area. I don't see how this even qualifies that definition.
You need to have higher standards; "no worse than Iran" is not something the US should aspire to.
As for standards: they are useless unless they allow for doing what is required to make the other side comply. Or at least, without that standards won't achieve their goal.
The world has chosen to not enforce war crime legislation under any circumstances, decades ago. Specifically, the agreement is the Rome statute, which essentially says that no government can ever be accused of a warcrime except in one of two circumstances. One, the government one whose soil it happened agrees to enforce war crime legislation AND asks for a conviction (Iran has not, and will not, do this). Either that or the UNSC convicts you.
Other than those 2 situations, war crimes aren't possible. And this is not something the US has chosen but the world has agreed. If any parties are responsible for that, it's Russia and China.
By the way, Iran has managed to commit bad enough warcrimes that China, Russia, US, France and the UK all agreed they were guilty of warcrimes. The US has not.
Someone call Celestia! Magic for all!
Maybe don’t have the buffoon who thinks he knows everything drive those kind of decisions
The side with $25M helicopters and $4m patriot missiles is at a big disadvantage to the side with $40K shaheeds here. Attrition favours the latter side. Assuming that both sides have stockpiles, the latter side will have more items in the stockpile, and will replenish it sooner. What happens when the air defences run out?
"A new AH-64E has a base flyaway cost of $35 million to $50 million, but international packages often exceed $100 million." [2]
So probably slightly older models.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_AH-64_Apache
[2] - https://www.wionews.com/photos/apache-helicopter-cost-vs-pow...
If the entire world was Dutch we'd be colonising the stars by now...
Component / part Company Company country Public factory / manufacturing-origin info
TJ150 turbojet engine PBS Velka Bites Czechia EU Czechia; manufacturer is PBS Velka Bites
TW1721 GNSS antennas, block of 4 Calian / Tallysman Canada Canada / West Ottawa, Canada manufacturing publicly stated by Calian/Tallysman
AD9361BBCZ RF transceiver Analog Devices USA USA COO/assembly: South Korea; wafer diffusion: Taiwan
MIMXRT1052 microcontroller NXP USA / NXP USA / Netherlands West Distributor COO often China; NXP PCN references SMIC8 40nm wafer fab
N63A0QI chip Intel USA USA Exact COO not found publicly
STM32F405 microcontroller units STMicroelectronics Switzerland / France / Italy Europe / Switzerland Probably Manufactured in China
ADIS16480 inertial measurement unit Analog Devices USA USA COO: Philippines; ADI PCN adds IMI Philippines as approved assembly site
TMS320F28335PGFA microcontroller Texas Instruments USA USA COO/assembly: Philippines; wafer diffusion: Japan
The drones run on literally whatever is available because any Western-built one is restricted to Iran or Russia.
Big sky theory says otherwise.
Given the US government's spiraling disregard for factuality, it's safe to assume any loss of equipment or personell in the area of operations is hostile, not accidental.
It’s much more factual and useful to point out that Trump is remarkably easily influenced and Netanyahu was able to remarkably easily influence him.
History often repeats itself. In a similar way, Great Powers like France refused to study the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 because it was something that happened in barbarian lands far away from glorious Europe, so it was obviously irrelevant to them, right? And then the shock of industrial warfare almost shattered the French army in summer 1914.
The US military is sitting on decades of older equipment. The Ukraine conflict started four years ago. Complaining that the US has not overhauled its inventory in just four years is unreasonable and unrealistic.
This has not seemed to be a problem for the countries using them; what makes the US so uniquely inefficient?
This shows that the US private sector can well produce contemporary drones on a compressed time scale.
It is the Pentagon which is not interested in overhauling settled vendor relations.
A basement lab can start making new drones as soon as you can get them the components. An assembly line will take months to get any new machinery it needs, set it up, ensure production works, figure out how to QA it at scale, etc.
It doesn’t matter if you can make 8 million drones if the enemy already has a way to counter that particular kind of drone. Eg I think Ukraine has been through a bunch of iterations as they adapt to Russian tank armor, jammers, extended range, etc.
Ukraine deploys several million drones a year, you can't get there by mere artisan workshops in garages.
Sure, the designer teams back in Ukraine are lean, their members wear tracksuits and don't have a 50-head Human Resources to watch their behavior, nor three levels of managers wearing Philippe Patek above them. That is part of the efficiency and lower cost.
Interesting that the Ukrainians can design, develop, produce and deploy a new type of a drone in something like 6 weeks.
Of course, they are in a life-or-death struggle and thus cannot afford a decade of paper wars with various lawyerly and MBA types who want to have their say.
That said, the US cannot afford those either, but it is under the illusion that it still can. Structural ossification at its best, and the result is ... inability to beat an impoverished, long sanctioned Middle-Eastern authoritarian regime into submission.
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to. Same with Russia vs Ukraine. Both the USA and Russia have ICBMs. Neither choose to use them, for political reasons.
Yes, russia can win anytime. They simply decided to grind a million of russians instead.
ICBM is a deterrent, not a winning weapon.
The Ukrainian drone industry isn't particularly expensive, BTW, and mostly grew up from private sector grassroots. Ukrainian military has had its own share of problems with ossified Soviet-era leadership. They were able to route around these, though. The US does not want to do this so far; probably too much money involved, and not enough risk to rock those boats (or yachts).
On Iran, describing the US as "inable" to win is structurally incorrect. The US could always win the war whenever it wants to.
Are you sure, with the shortages of equipment that take years to replenish? In what sense? I am not even sure if the US has enough naval capability to make a D-day-like landing in Iran right now. That requires specialized ships and training.
The US could probably win the war if it went in fully: as you say, if it was fully mobilized and restructured into a war economy like Ukraine. But that is already quite a bad situation to be in. If a superpower needs to do this in order to fight someone like Iran, it is not really a (conventional) superpower anymore.
The US could also wipe Iran using nuclear missiles, but the political ramifications of such a step would be catastrophic.
So could Pakistan. Pakistan has enough nukes to wipe Iran off the Earth (not that they want to). But no one mistakes Pakistan for a superpower just because they have deliverable nukes.
Neither do you understand that the US has optimized its military around conflict against the PRoC. The US has fought multiple proxy wars against the PRoC. Arguably, the current Iran conflict is a proxy war against the PRoC. Future military spending is focused on countering China, not on the style of conflict Ukraine is facing.
That is why the US is phasing out military assets such as infantry forces and artillery, and is investing in unmanned vehicles and long-range missiles.
Further, you incorrectly quote and misinterpret what I wrote about ICBMs. The US (and Russia) could always win their current conflicts with ICBMs, but choose not to. That is a calculated choice, not an inability to win as you claim.
"Arguably, the current Iran conflict is a proxy war against the PRoC."
That is stretching it. The vast majority of weapons that Iran deployed were of their own build, and China sends nowhere near as much equipment to Iran as, say, Europe to Ukraine.
"Future military spending is focused on countering China, not on the style of conflict Ukraine is facing."
Which is part of the problem. As a wanna-still-be-superpower, the US will face a lot of diverse conflicts in the world, with various characteristics.
"The US is not optimized to fight such a war."
The US is not optimized to a bombing campaign against countries the size of Iran anymore either. You are literally running out of things to throw at them after mere weeks have passed.
Good luck fighting China then, with its 16x as big population and 100x as big economy than Iran has.
"The US (and Russia) could always win their current conflicts with ICBMs, but choose not to. That is a calculated choice, not an inability to win as you claim."
War is continuation of politics, not just destruction for its own sake. To win the war does not mean "utterly destroy a certain region", but "make the opponent do as you wish, at least in some aspects, against his will, while not suffering catastrophic consequences elsewhere".
If political constraints stop you from deploying WMDs, and you cannot achieve your political aims with conventional weapons, that counts as an inability to win the war. Can the US make the Iranian leadership drop their nuclear ambitions? It does not seems so. Can the US wipe Iran off the map? Yes, but at the cost of becoming a pariah nation, which is worse than ayatollahs having a few nukes. Only a fool would call the latter "victory".
Iran would not be able to pursue nuclear weapons nor missiles without China's assistance. The precursors of the missile fuel, the precursors of yellowcake processing, the chips and hardware of Iranian drones, all come from China with its assistance and blessing.
China has provided military equipment and weapons to Iran. China has military personnel in Iran operating air defense systems. It is accurate to call this a proxy war.
The fact you are unaware of any of this, demonstrates your lack of understanding of the conflict.
Further proof you do not comprehend US doctrine, is that the US can always escalate the conflict and pursue a ground war. But is hesitant to do so simply because Trump does not want war. Trump prefers quick, surgical operations; and does not want to drag the US into a forever war like Bush Jr and Obama did.
You keep claiming the US is "inable" to win the war, yet you do not understand the definition of this word. Choosing not do pursue a strategy for political reasons is not inable. The US would win a ground war against Iran, full stop. Your analysis fails to consider this option. But it would win at the cost of thousands of lives, and likely the US would need to occupy the country, which is politically challenging, and Trump is savvy enough to be hesitant to pursue this option.
You also lack historical understanding of war. You forget that total destruction and capitulation was the default strategy of war for millenia, see strategies of the Mongols or the war against Japan, where the US firebombed and leveled Japanese cities, even nuking them, until capitulation.
You seem to be stuck on repeat with "don't understand, don't understand, don't understand". Yet it seems to me that it is you who got sucked into some bizarro understanding of war being fundamentally an annihilation contest between the two parties involved. This very shallow understanding is now somewhat widespread in the blogosphere and pushed by, again, shallow types like Stephen Miller. Claims like "total destruction and capitulation was the default strategy of war for millenia" are just not true. It happened sometimes, but quite often also not, because warring parties always have some limits to their effort, be it ideological, economic or political limits. And this was no less true in Antiquity than today.
Outside the bizarro "total destruction" corner, war between organized states has been understood primarily as a continuation of politics, with the goal to make your enemy do something that they don't want to. Even the Mongols you mentioned usually gave a besieged city an option to surrender, because their primary goal wasn't simply to kill, but to conquer and rule.
Yes, there are exceptions (Carthago delenda est), but these exceptions aren't the historical rule.
Let us look at the situation in Iran now.
The US seems to want something from Iran. It is not very clear what, but probably free movement of ships through Hormuz, nuclear disarmament and maybe even regime change.
It also does NOT want to genocide the Persians out of existence. While doable, it would carry a heavy reputational penalty and cause significant friction back at home. Not even Trump wants to add tens of millions of civilian lives to his conscience, hence WMDs are out of question.
A ground invasion is thinkable, but I am much less persuaded about its efficiency than you are. As you yourself say, this has a risk of turning into a forever war and the US isn't equipped, mentally nor doctrinally, to fight forever wars.
Which means that you likely won't get what you want from the current Iranian leadership by the sort of military means you can feasibly use against them, and that is not a victory.
Please give me a plausible scenario in which the current US is capable of winning a ground war against Iran in the presence of all the current political limitations, which are quite fundamental. You can't.
Ultimately it does not matter if you can't win because you cannot muster the political will to engage in a costly war, or if you can't win because you run out of Tomahawks (both are correlated, btw). It is still an inability to win, which is obviously detrimental to the US imperial standing.
First, a large scale bombing campaign, targeting Iranian infrastructure.
Dropping bombs on every power substation, fuel plant, and generation plant would cripple the economy, and grind the country to a halt. A similar strategy was applied to Japan and Germany in WWII. If these facilities have military purpose, destroying these facilities is not necessarily a war crime.
A modern economy cannot function without fuel and electricity. The economy will quickly grind to a halt, and Iran will be forced to confront internal problems before mounting a concerted response.
After 2-3 weeks of chaos, the US would launch a ground invasion, though Pakistan and Iraq. It would then remove the nuclear material, clean up Iranian missiles that target ships in the strait, and the US would leave.
It achieves the primary, secondary, and tertiary goals of the war: no more nuclear weapons, removal of nuclear material, and reopening of the strait.
Combat losses to the US would be minimal. The cost for Iran, though, is astronomically high. It would take years for the country to rebuild, and set back the nation economically for decades.
Trump is trying hard to avoid this option. Many other presidents (I'd wager Kamela) would have gone down this path by now.
The necessary buildup would take several months and would happen within range of Iranian drones.
Neither Iraq nor Pakistan seem to be particularly likely to grant a permission to the US to stage a large-scale land operation against Iran from their own territory. Both have large populations partly sympathetic to the mullahs, the political destabilization caused by taking the side of "infidels" against the "faithful", plus suffering Iranian drone retaliation, would be just too costly for them.
"First, a large scale bombing campaign, targeting Iranian infrastructure."
The US already did that and emptied its arsenals to dangerously low levels. Were they replenished? Probably not yet, this is what we are discussing here; the military-industrial complex in America has grown fat and complacent and cannot quickly increase production beyond the very low level optimized out by post-Cold-War MBAs.
"Combat losses to the US would be minimal."
Uncertain. The US could probably swallow its pride and go to Kyiv to shop for anti-drone know-how and technology. In that case, the combat losses would be lower. If people like Vance and Trump cannot do that, I would rather expect the US losses to be at least in lower tens of thousands. A million cheap FPV drones can do a lot of dirty work, and this is probably the stuff that China can send to the IRGC quite quickly.
That is beyond absurd claim. But, if it was true, then the USA is loosing even more badly. This war is helping exactly two countries - Russia and China.
> The US (and Russia) could always win their current conflicts with ICBMs, but choose not to.
This is copium and in both cases. If Russia could win that conflict, if it could take over, it would do it. If USA could win, they would do it. Heck, if USA was able to walk away from the conflict, at this point it would. It just so happen that Israel does not want to allow it and Iran thinks they are getting into better position with each passing week.
It's easy to list these off the top of my head. There are multiple. Obviously the Korean War, China sent over a million personnel to aid the DPRK and directly battled the US. The Vietnam war was a proxy war, China had over 300,000 troops in North Vietnam, preventing the US from invading the north and ending the conflict. The Russia/Ukraine war is a double-proxy war; both the US and China are arming their respective sides.
The current conflict is also a proxy war. Without China's support for Iran, this war could not have happened. China provides the precursors for Iranian missile fuel, Iran purchased tons of sodium perchlorate from China; China provides the chemicals that are needed for yellowcake and Iran's nuclear program; China provides the parts for Iran's drone program. China also provides the anti-aircraft systems that Iran uses, though so far these have proven to be questionably effective. China has an active part in this conflict, there are Chinese military personnel in Iran actively maintaining their radar systems.
Without China, there are no missiles, there are no nukes, there are no drones. There is no war.
And claiming China benefits from this war is myopic. China has massive investments across the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The war in Iran directly affects the value of these investments, and China's support for Iran is alienating Middle Eastern countries. China is trying to play both sides, but that is not a viable long term strategy.
The previous poster is claiming the US is 'inable' to end the war with Iran; this is trivially false, the US has ICBMs, and can trivially end the war. You have listed the consequences of doing so, yet I was responding to their claim, which is separate matter.
You can say the same about other countries trading with Iran. Also Iran had missiles before China started to be a global player.
> The current conflict is also a proxy war. Without China's support for Iran, this war could not have happened.
This is nonsense. War happened with or without Chinas support, because American leadership and Israel wanted it. Iran was not attacked because of Chinese support, Iran was attacked because USA and Israel thought Iran will be easy to defeat.
> Without China, there are no missiles, there are no nukes, there are no drones. There is no war.
Without China, USA would still be starting the war.
> And claiming China benefits from this war is myopic. China has massive investments across the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The war in Iran directly affects the value of these investments, and China's support for Iran is alienating Middle Eastern countries.
China is gaining through USA loosing position, wasting missiles and alienating, well pretty much everyone.
> The previous poster is claiming the US is 'unable' to end the war with Iran; this is trivially false, the US has ICBMs, and can trivially end the war.
USA is in fact unable to end the war with Iran. Trump would very much like to end it ... he just cant.
For 1), the US isn't in a hurry because there's no actual threat. The lack of drone warfare capabilities only impacts US action overseas and of the little bipartisan consensus left, one thing is clear: no new wars (Trump's Iran war is seen as betrayal from his own party but it's hard to oppose Dear Leader).
For 2), it's hard to win when you don't know what you're doing or declare victory when you don't know what your goals are. I'm not sure there's even domestic agreement that it's a war.
2) I concur, there seem to be no actual goals there. There is a Croatian saying that "form whomever who doesn't know where he wants to sail, no wind is useful". This fits.
"If your immediate plan is to stop fighting in far away places, then drones aren't really a worry."
Yes, you can dismantle the entire coalition your presidents put together for 70+ years, but at some cost. The US economy is heavily intertwined with the rest of the world, and it probably cannot decouple from China AND forty democratic countries that used to be US allies at the same time.
Might be cheaper just to respect the current entanglements, at least in the long run.
Furthermore, Choppers arent obsolete and if you got em, it makes sense go use them.
Currently it's hard for any nation to meaningfully adapt, as the new tech develops far faster than any governement procurment process.
Both UA and RU still operate helicopters, but their survival envelope has tightened drastically and they won't even try to fly a chopper over a wide body of water anywhere near the enemy. To survive in a drone-infested war theatre, a chopper must fly really low and mask itself using terrain features as much as possible.
The USA is the Russia of the West nowadays.
Why does Iran have the right to fire drones into other countries?
If America hadn't started bombing Iran in the first place this wouldn't have happened anyway. Things would have been peaceful and oil prices would have been fine.
Did you forget the purpose of the war?
The purpose of the war was keeping Netanyahu in power by having a constant war going on. And Trump went along because he was promised a quick win which he could have used to turn his midterms around.
Such a dumb lie.
At this point, every country with the ability to do so should be procuring nuclear deterrence capability, if for no other reason than to defend themselves from the US.
Maybe because the Israel-US axis decided it was a good idea to start bombing them earlier this year? Could be that?
Perhaps, and this is a long shot, they see military equipment close to their border as a threat?
People get weird like that when countries start bombing their schoolgirls into minced meat.
This entire conflict was fully avoidable if Iran never pursued nuclear weapons.
Why can't Iran just be a normal country, and not pursue nuclear weapons?
Is that a good excuse to turn schoolgirls into minced meat?
Also, let's not pretend this started in a vacuum. The US has been interfering in Iran for many decades.
> This entire conflict was fully avoidable if Iran never pursued nuclear weapons.
> Why can't Iran just be a normal country, and not pursue nuclear weapons?
If anything, history shows that every country should pursue Nuclear weapons.
That is the best insurance policy one can have against the US.
Is Iran in a better position after firing missiles at Azerbaijan, Oman, and Turkey? All three of these countries were neutral or friendly towards Iran, until Iran fired missiles at each unprompted.
Its current situation is largely self-inflicted, and a result of poor foreign policy choices.
> If anything, history shows that every country should pursue Nuclear weapons.
Why stop there, we should give every person on Earth nuclear weapons.
That policy will lead to world peace, since there will be no world left to live in.
Nice to show how ignorant of history you are.
Yes, yes.
Like it was left to itself in the 50s and 70s.
Cool story bro.
> That policy will lead to world peace, since there will be no world left to live in.
You know what does not lead to world peace? A situation where the US believes it has free pass to bomb other countries and interfere on them unchecked.
Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Jordan, Iraq, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Cyprus
completely unprompted, this year. Each of these countries had peaceful relations with Iran, prior to Iran attacking them. Oman was negotiating on Iran's side to resolve the conflict with Israel, yet Iran bombed them anyway. Azerbaijan has no ties to the Israel/US/Iran conflict. Yet Iran shot attack drones at a school in Azerbaijan anyway.
Should such a country be trusted with nuclear weapons?
It has been attacked prior to that.
You keep pretending Iran is the agressor here.
It is actually defending itself, attacking countries in its vicinity that harbor US forces.
> completely unprompted, this year
US bombed Iran amidst negotiations, before Iran attacked those countries.
You have a very interesting notion of what "unprompted" means.
> Should such a country be trusted with nuclear weapons?
Are you talking about the US?
I certainly don't think it can be trusted with any weapons.
> It is actually defending itself, attacking countries in its vicinity that harbor US forces.
Azerbaijan has no US military bases, it has no Israeli military bases, it has no ties to the current conflict, yet Iran still fired drones at a school in Azerbaijan, completely unprompted.
Oman was negotiating a peace agreement between Israel and Iran, it was actively advocating on the side Iran for a peace deal, Oman tried their hardest to remain neutral towards Iran in this conflict, yet Iran betrayed them and still fired drones at ports in Oman in the opening days of the war.
Iran has attacked all of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Jordan, Iraq, Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Cyprus just this year.
Iran's actions betray each of your claims.
Iran makes poor foreign policy decisions. Iran made the conscious choice to attack these countries. Iran chooses a hostile foreign policy toward its neighbors. None of these countries want conflict with Iran, all of them want peace, yet Iran attacks them anyway.
(I would add that this is sarcasm, but it is reality for a lot of people sadly)
You don't seem to know about the wars Russia fought even in the last 30 years, and the ways they did.
This is why you don't used manned systems to hunt unmanned ones ...