@cstross Trump and the people around him are absolute morons, yes, but there is a weird motivated thinking desire among many to breathlessly claim US military hardware - which Trump had no hand in the development of - somehow sucks.

The F-35, for all its infamous flaws, is working better than experts expected. It was never designed to be fully stealthy - it emits radar so it can see and shoot at enemy aircraft.

And SM-3 continues to be phenomenal.

But the awesome performance of some systems

@cstross really does not change the fact that there never was any way to "win" this Iran War. You just have to look at this size, terrain, population layout of Iran compared to Iraq 2003 to get an idea of what sort of invasion force would have been necessary.

And there aren't any neighbors to Iran eager to become an invasion staging area.

So ... Iran will win. Period. They'll get bombed and stuff, and then ... they'll win.

@isaackuo @cstross The US victory conditions are for the Islamic Republic to go away. (US elite consensus that it's illegitimate, generational offense at daring to claim ownership of oil, etc.) They don't need to be Napoleon and be lauded as a conqueror.

Take a look at Iran on Google Maps; switch on the traffic.

Sparse transportation network, very concentrated; single export economy.

Think kinetic sanctions; blow up the ability to export oil and the roads over the mountains. Mine the ports.

@isaackuo @cstross Is this a big bundle of war crimes before they start bombing power plants? Yes. The whole thing is illegitimate per the defunct post-war order.

Does anyone in the US administration care at all? No. (Many are actively in favor.)

Can the US do it? This is one of the things you can do with air supremacy.

Will it work?

It could; starving people are docile, but people who know they're going to starve are not. (Not that this is going to save anybody.)

@graydon @cstross Okay, but how does this actually make the Iranian regime go away?

Yeah, starving people may be docile, but this would help whoever's already in power.

Unless you have a full on invasion force, I see "regime change" as a political struggle. And Trump's hurting, not helping, political support for the Iranian opposition.

@isaackuo @cstross It takes a minimum economy to maintain a regime. It needs radios and the ability to manufacture small arms ammunition and keep records. If you crash an economy hard enough and external support isn't available (no sufficient transport network over those mountain passes before they get mined), it stops being able to have a government.

It's not even a little bit hard to imagine this administration deciding that's the plan.

Much better if they don't, but.

@graydon @cstross Okay, I understand that as a theory, but I don't see how that would work in practice.

It's hard to imagine being bombed back into the Stone Age more than the Taliban, and ... well, we saw how that worked out.

And it's not like the Taliban was the darling of external helping superpowers or anything.

And the terrain was - oops - yeah, similar to much of Iran. And the region - oh yeah, right next door.

@isaackuo @cstross The US adventure in Afghanistan was undertaken while trying to do nation-building and while following the laws of war. (the much-complained about JAG representatives checking legitimacy of airstrike targets, etc.) It was seen as a fight.

If you don't do that and bomb power plants, food stocks, oil refineries, water infrastructure, etc. with specific genocidal intent, you get different results. There's a circulating narrative around "could have won if" about this approach.

@graydon @cstross Well, I can certainly believe that various people who are stupid (if not AS stupid as Trump) wishfully believing in that sort of genocidal theory.

I just don't think it would actually work.

I mean, of course the sort of people who would fall for this sort of theory tend to not be the most stable minds to begin with...

@isaackuo @cstross Which is kinda the problem; someone sensible won't do this even if they're certain it will work because it affects everyone's planning for centuries thereafter, and the cost of that is greater than any present gain can possibly be.

That's different from saying that it won't be tried, and there is certainly both a profit motive and a structural desire for revenge involved.

(Oil has an extraction price; this gets the commodity price much higher than the extraction price.)

@graydon @isaackuo I see us getting into a feedback cycle.

Oil/gas war in the Gulf -> skyrocketing oil/gas prices.

High fossil prices -> PV/battery more profitable

Profitable renewables -> less demand for fossils

Sinking demand -> increases incentive for war in the Gulf to keep prices high (before fossil energy fields become stranded assets)

So we're getting into end-of-oil scarcity wars, with the added twist that there's no overall energy shortage, it's just a capitalism extinction burst.

@fazalmajid @cstross @isaackuo I can well believe it.

A sea mine as generally imagined is 19th century technology and not in any way efficient.

Today, there are ocean gliders with many month's endurance; it would not be hard to make these crisscross shipping lanes and preferentially attack propellers. One state-level actor doing the design work is all it takes, and it's not easy to believe no one has.

Clearing such things would be a selection of novel challenges.

@graydon @fazalmajid @cstross My intuition is that ocean gliders would not be suitable for acting as sea mines - too much mass and complexity for too little payload - but in any case they aren't needed. (And they're way too slow to go after propellers.)

As it is, even WWII era mines are DIFFICULT to counter and DIFFICULT to sweep. Particularly difficult to deal with are simple sea bed mines, and you can't just sweep them easily because they can be programmed with a waiting counter.

@isaackuo @fazalmajid @cstross the problem with trad mines is that you have to deploy them in visible ways; it isn't practical if the other side has continuous reconnaissance or air dominance.

Anybody planning to fight the US expects to operate subjected to both of those things.

A modern take on the [Helmover torpedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmover_torpedo) with more autonomy and some form of rapid coastal launch could be quite effective for strait control.