And then China gets frisky with Taiwan and the US will totally not abandon them and tell them to just give up pressured by the lack of firepower to defend them, the risks of China getting back into bidding oil in international markets and the mess the treasury would be in if China raises capital by selling bonds (they just told the fed to print more so Japan can buy yens without selling their US bonds, so they are at least very concerned about the possibility).
Sorry for the rant.
The reality is that fighting China would be a proper all-out war, not whatever this spitting match with Iran is.
Of course I only mean if the war was necessary to fight at all, I don't believe it was.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
Never say never.
Are you openly saying the president and the secretary of war are lying when they say they have done "massive" bombings of Iran?
Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactions_to_the_2026_Iran_war
What the fuck is wrong with the human species and its tendency for self-destructive leader-worship??
That basically sets up an equilibrium where you have a small number of people who can cause the deaths and suffering of millions. To escape it there'd need to be an economic sweet spot where armies couldn't cost effectively coerce small groups of people. But that seems unlikely because the economies of scale to outfit an army favour large groups. We've been lucky enough so far in the modern era that a strong army requires supporting a thriving economy.
And how well is it coercing Iranian government right now? It is proving itself not only ineffective, but also ludicrously inefficient in terms of money. And to think all that could have been accomplished by building diplomatic relationships, building schools, hospitals, colleges, and, ultimately, cultural and economic ties… When an empire needs to resort to military might, it’s usually in its final states - the US itself made the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and now it’s falling on that very same trap.
Starting wars has only been unequivocally negative for maybe the last 100 years. Not enough for an evolutionary change to manifest itself.
The fallout will come later, of course.
Taiwan is no West Berlin and everyone knows it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The costs of medicare, medicaid and CHIP to tax payers are about what most Europeans pay in tax for universal health care, but then they also need to pay for health insurance for themselves.
As for controlling Hormuz, the US military absolutely could control Hormuz. I'm confident it's quite capable of it. It's that the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it, and maintain that control. No other military could even try, but the the USA could. It's not a matter of lack of military capacity.
I never understood these kinds of arguments and they always come from those defending US military might.
Either they can do it or they cannot, if "the US public wouldn't support the immense cost in lives and treasure it would take to do it" is true, which it appears to be, then the US Military cannot control Hormuz.
Complexity.
There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.
That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').
But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.
Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.
There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.
That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.
This is usually the point the economy is flipped around into a war-based economy where all output is directed to military equipment.
Yeah it's stupid, though with this administration stupid seems to be the flavor they prefer.
US would lose a land war with Iran. They’d lose it spectacularly too.
You can't win a war purely through air superiority and bombs. That's not a new lesson but it's one the administration failed to learn through history and is apparently now failing to learn through practice).
In previous conflicts the US military could get a lot done with bombs, but that's risky if you can't get air superiority and take out all enemy anti-air systems. Which is more difficult against an enemy who can shoot at your air bases and aircraft carriers. But those previous conflicts might have contributed to a false sense of security about required missile stockpiles
If you have 10 targets and use atacms in all 10, there's something wrong in the decision making process or the strategy.
like waging a war while insisting they aren't really waging a war and it's just a special military operation and as a side effect having effectively no access to a lot of the resources/means normally used
US could indiscriminately drop dumb bombs but you would have a higher civilian casualty rate.
Except not really. If they were willing to risk sending many aircraft deep into Iranian airspace with SDBs and JDAMs they wouldn't be running out of ballistic missiles.
The issue is general industrial capacity, not missiles specifically.
I don't think so. This observation completely misses the root cause, and it ain't missiles.
Armed forces size their stockpiles in terms of their short term needs focused on rapid reaction and deterrence. The goal is to be able to react to immediate threats and then shift the economy to a war economy to supply the effort in economically efficient ways.
What failed this time is that the trump administration was hoping to attack Iran without having to declare war, effectively starting a war without preparing for the war.
The results are obvious: the peace time stockpile was depleted at a time where the country was not prepared to replenish it. Trump shifter the us armed forces to deplete their stockpile while avoiding the responsibility of supporting them in their mission by taking care of supplies.
And so they ran out of ammo.
There are further compounding factors such as a lack of plan and lack of exit strategy. But placing your military in a state where they spend their ammo without any plan to ressuply it... You will have the same problem if you replace hellfire missiles with sticks and stones.
And blames Biden for this mess. "Oh... the cupboards were bare when I came back...". If you KNEW you were running low on supplies, why start a war? There's enough general answers to this, all revolving around his immaturity, lack of intelligence and the cult around him - the truth is somewhere in the middle of all that...
It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in. The USA's industrial output back in WWII was staggering, its enemies had little hope of victory given the sheer number of materiel that would eventually get deployed. Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.
But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.
Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.
> a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking
That's what I'm trying to say.
Losing is what happened to Germany after both World Wars.
The US inflicted orders of magnitude more casualties than the ~60k deaths they suffered in Vietnam. The US has proven its willingness to withstand much greater losses: ~300k deaths in WWII, ~200k deaths in its civil war.
They did a staggering amount of damage but were unable to secure a decisive military victory. So the war started to drag on, the casualties started to mount, costs started to pile up and the unpopularity of the war applied political pressure.
Writing this off as a "loss" doesn't seem to accurately describe what happened. I think they could have won, but the cost was too high so they pulled out. Engagement must not have been important enough another 200k-300k deaths.
It's laughable to use such a silly euphemism to imply America was not defeated! The North Vietnamese won. Get over it.
copium
> It's their relentless deindustrialization that will eventually do them in
Agree, China has already won, at this point a lot of the world sees them as a more sane option than USA as well which is a nuts timeline
The rest of the world is finding China a more predictable and stable trading partner than the USA.
Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.
On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.
>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.
American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.
But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.
Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.
Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.
"The estimated cost of the war in Vietnam during the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations was $176 billion."
Adjusted for inflation, that is $1,192 billion in 2026 dollars.
"The longest war in American history had significant economic effects both domestically and internationally in terms of what was spent on the war and what expenses had to be cut."
The US is not doing amazing in this war but no need to give the Iranians too much credit. The Iranians are expanding a lot of resources of their own as much as this war drags on.
It is still very early to say how a country will fare considering that it ran out of water and was on a verge of economic breakdown and revolt before fighting a prolonged war with economic blockade of its main export.
The US spent years fighting north Vietnamese forces only to sign a peace treaty, leave south Vietnam and then 2 years later have North Vietnam take over South Vietnam and unify the country.
You don't consider completely failing your objectives failure?
In both cases, Washington chose to stop sustaining a local government that could not survive on its own.
Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, which was a little over two years after the last US combat troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973. US did not lose Afghanistan on the battlefield. US military overthrew the Taliban government, dismantled al-Qaeda’s sanctuary, killed Osama bin Laden, and prevented another major foreign-directed terrorist attack from Afghan soil for nearly twenty years. American forces were not defeated or driven out; they left because elected political leaders decided the mission was no longer worth continuing.
In both cases, the threats were eliminated. Hanoi is now friendly to the US. Iraq is friendly to the US. Syria is friendly to the US.
The USA apparently sees these little wars as investments or something. It's getting too expensive: cut losses and pull out the troops.
A real "USA loses" scenario involves the White House flying a foreign flag. A real defeat of the USA would probably shock americans to the core. Fully expect them to lash out with nuclear weapons if such a thing ever happens.
Is that and act of victory or defeat ?
Defeat is the US military getting routed and decimated. Defeat is US aircraft carriers sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Defeat is Washington getting nuked.
What actually happens is the opposite. Americans show up and inflict staggering casualties while suffering a relatively small anount. Then they suddenly leave for some idiotic reason like the president wanting reelection.
America's enemies don't need to actually win, they just need to resist as long as possible and drive up the costs of the war via asymmetric warfare.
It was a civil war that the US got involved in, and they supported the side that lost.
Who governs those countries matters, but America cannot spend unlimited blood and treasure ensuring that every country is governed by people we approve of.
The threats were eliminated. Mission accomplished.
Ask Pakistan if the threat of Afghanistan-based terrorism has been eliminated.
this wasn't the case for the US, their military did work and was effective in context of the specific think they where used for. It's just that the thing they where used for isn't effective in winning the kind of conflict the US did start.
while this is "just" the "non effective" part being some where else it is a very fundamental difference in the end
like to put it this way,
if weapons of mass destruction like nukes, bio weapons etc. would magically disappear an invasion and takeover of (part of mainland) Russia would be relatively viable (mainly by China, but others might want a slice, too).
on the other hand even without weapons of mass destruction trying to invade the mainland US still seems futile/to be a losing battle, no matter who tries it.
The big weakness is industrial capacity, but only China can exploit that at scale.
The Russo-Ukrainian war is a war of invasion.
The US-Iranian is more of an air superiority campaign.
If you want any take away lesson: don't attack countries that care about defending themselves. Not everyone is Iraq.
And don't underestimate the efficiency of asymmetric warfare.
I have been vaguely watching the Ukraine conflict over the past few years. From my distant and zero experience observations, it seems like missiles are extremely effective BUT also extremely limited. So you blow up that one building or SAM you targeted. Well done. What about the other 10,000 static targets? What about the guys with FPV drones and shoulder-launched anti-air now inside the rubble of the building you just destroyed? Send another XX-million USD missile to blow up the building you already blew up?
Feels like a determined adversary who is not easily cowed with a quick bit of "shock and awe" and armed with cheap, mobile winged/quad drones and man-portable guided anti-air/-tank missiles has totally changed the equation. Expensive limited missiles/planes/tanks/ships in smaller numbers seem kinda limited in their ability to get results in today's battlefield where there are FPV drones literally at every turn, and can be operated from literally a hole in the ground 15km away by people who aren't about to easily surrender.
It feels somewhat like the US doctrine has been to start with a "hit 'em hard" opening salvo of cruise/ballistic missiles and rockets etc and hope for immediate surrender. So far the lesson from Ukraine and Iran seems to be expect a big wave first attack or two and if you survive that initial push then suddenly the big super-power has no more cards left to play and it's down to men on the ground with hand-held weapons and drones. I wonder if people will look back at this era as a "WW1 moment" where the old ways of battle suddenly looked hopelessly out of date.
The current US force configuration was designed to fight quick wars against opponents who mostly can’t fight back. It’s a military built to play “global police,” and for a short while this was probably the correct configuration.
Building a military that stands ready to fight any kind of war is probably impossible—it would be too expensive. You need to look at the biggest threats and optimize for those conflicts. The problem that the US now faces is that rival nations have optimized for defense against its particular style of maneuver warfare with heavy air bombardment. Air defense (not missile defense) is better and cheaper than ever.
The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.
The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.
These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).
It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.
It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.
The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.
This is not true. US is known for the best logistics in the world.
US power is mostly strategic, it's 'Air Based' which gives the kind of instant leverage leaders like. It's 'Aircraft Carrier Based'.
The US doesn't have that same overwhelming ability otherwise.
You can't quite an Army overseas - it takes a different kind of logistics esp. in Pacific, one the US doesn't quite have the level of sophistication.
Don't get me wrong - 'it could' but would take a while to ramp up.
Missiles are always easier to replace then platforms of any kind.
But yes - a single, lone captive could cause political devastation.
Missiles, more expensive - depending on.
Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.
Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.
Doctrine isn't the same as inability.
I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"
Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.
You can’t win a war with just air power.
See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).
edit: this is the document I am talking about http://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022...
- A country, even as big as the US, is strictly, evidently, not exceptional.
- The US lost the majority of the wars it joined/started in the last 100 years and came home every time trying to sell it as a victory despite not achieving their war goals.
- You may have weapons or power of some kind, but every move you make costs you some kind of currency: time, material, energy, credibility, goodwill. You may have large amounts, but they're never infinite.
- Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal: change and control are "constructive" concepts, while bombs can only offer you guaranteed chaos. You MIGHT be able to steer that chaos afterwards, but it's not guaranteed and numbers do not simply improve your position here. (see: Iraq, etc.)
- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.
- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.
If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.
The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.
The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.
The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.
That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.
I'm not sure how far the Administration would go but they are very strongly restricted by US Armed forces procedures and just norms.
I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.
Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).
And the Caribbean.
The notion one would even try to compare 'the Caribbean' - where USN is destroying drug running boats - which is arguably against some maritime laws but is nevertheless exceedingly acute, I think shows how wound up people are in the political context.
There is no relevant kinetic fallout in the Caribbean - it's an Elephant precisely stepping on a single ant.
Capture of Venezuelan Oil ... almost certainly illegal.
But that's a different thing
As for Vietnam - start by laying the context for why the N. Vietnamese imprisoned, tortured, killed 100's of thousands of political dissidents and civilians of all kinds, and continued that horrible repression for decades even to this day as they continue to crack down on mild dissent. The actual facts on both sides are actually ugly, but woefully misrepresented and the same utterly bizarre dual moral lens is applied ... a bit like in the Iranian situation as well.
Implied in the question is the despotism in plain site: why did N. Vietnam invade Cambodia? Against the will of those people? And murder and maraud in that territory?
The difference is between that, as a starting point, and strategic bombing of rural roadways (Ho Chi Min trail) etc., which ironically was in lieu of actually bombing North Vietnam which should have been done right from the onset, would have prevented a war, and saved 1/2 the population from a perennial nightmare and given the citizens some say in their future.
But it's also an example of the extent of the ability of superpowers to project power.
The title says "virtually all" but the first paragraph says "much". The actual stockpile is probably larger than this news report would make it seem. It would be convenient for Trump and his Russia-loving cronies if it would appear that the USA has no more weapons to support Ukraine with, of course.
Many advanced NATO weapons being difficult to produce and only being available in small quantities is something that has been discussed before, I don't think that's news. The rate at which they're being spammed without much result at Iran is, but that's hardly surprising given the current people in charge.
America is not happy when it is not at war. There has to be an enemy. The old WOT had finally run out of steam; people are coming out of college who were born after 9/11. Venezuela (and Latin America generally) made a good enemy for a while, but they were too easily defeated. But Iran? America has wanted a rematch since Jimmy Carter.
(A bipartisan problem, mostly, but propped up by pro-war media. The only people against it are a few Democrats, almost all of whom are women)
“People who are familiar with this matter” is doing a lot of work.
This reeks of laundering lies.
Hopefully they're able to learn lessons from Ukraine as well and pivot towards cheaper missiles and autonomous vehicles
So not the US. There is also the Navy, Air Force etc
Borderline clickbait
Missing the ‘has’ part for “present perfect tense”, e.g. “a past action with present relevance”.
In an ongoing war.
The title seems fairy inaccurate
There’s no growth or hope. It’s all bad news, war, and rumors of war - and all reads like a bad WWE script.
Just seems like a coordinated effort to destroy from within since about ~2016 or at least act out this play of America in Decline
Whatever, would be way better if they celebrate collaboration and forward thinking again.
Mainly because it’s just so boring under Trump - this should have been a 4 year show
First, those are short- to medium-range weapons.
Second, the USAF and USN hold most of the US's long-range precision weaponry, the only real exception being the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), which is not yet fielded.
There is not really any strategy here in place that makes sense from an US point of view. There is a strategy in place that may make sense for Netanyahu (e. g. remain in power) but this is not a US strategic point of view. Trump seems to be the most easily influenced roleplaying as "president". People need to follow the money trail here - that would explain the whole situation right now best.
Is it even a correct framing for the conflict ? Iran seems to have big issues with UAE and Saudi Arabia and repeatedly fired at them and got fired by them.
I wasn't intended to imply Ukraine is an adversary, AFAIK to the US, they aren't.
Edit: I realize my original comment was a bit ambiguous, I'm talking about Iran, I've now put "received" into quotes.