@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 Yep.

For people who've never looked at a map (most Americans, apparently), my synopsis is, "Iran is Mordor". Big-ass empire surrounded on all sides by water or mountains. Also, it's on the other side of the world from the USA. Also-also, the littoral approaches are all naval death-traps. There's a REASON the Persian Empire didn't get conquered very often, and it's geopolitics!

@cstross @isaackuo I think its even simpler - Iranian leadership has been planning for this for 50 years and are clearly prepared to extract maximum pain from the world until the us is stopped.

Meanwhile us leadership appears to have thrown out 50 years of knowledge about Iran, strategic alliances, soft economic power, and every other advantage they had that wasn't "more expensive weapons" and started a war with about 5 seconds of thought

More planning went into the Iraq War for fucks sake

@Jer @cstross @isaackuo

US leadership appears to have gotten to the point where "The USA might not be able to control the course of events" counts as an Outside Context Problem.

I don't think any of our legislators realize how the next couple years are going to go, nor that their only chance to affect that was 3 weeks ago. They seem to believe they can observe events and if, in the future, things will go too far, they'll be able to call it all off at that point.