PigletThe whole Iran thing is a douzie for trump at this point. Commit to sending ground forces to the north shore of the straights, attempt a full invasion, or climb down and end the war. The first two offer significant difficulties and a lot of dead Americans and Iranians and the forever war that's already extremely unpopular. The climb down end the war and negotiate is tricky not just for ego and face saving, it also depends on compelling Israel to stop and netinshitbag won't because he needs a win
Negation also damages "US invincibility" which has already taken a hit in Ukraine. Ground ops though are potential able to succeed short term militarily at least, but will not lead to any kind of safe sustainable security for the straights or the region.
Simon Brooke@piglet may not even bring short term relief. #Iran has a lot of mountains, which means a lot of places you can hide small workshops, and the Iranian drones and rockets are low-tech devices designed to be easily built in small distributed workshops. There aren't single massive armament factories that surveillance can easily locate and bombing easily destroy. There's no reason to believe that the US can quickly suppress Iran's ability to build and launch missiles and drones.
@simon_brooke and all Iran has to do is make it unattractive to shipping companies and insurers, the cost of providing air defence warships would be phenomenal especially compared to ending the war. In all honesty i think the big problem for trump is going to be Israel, who's objective with Iran is either a pro Israel regime or complete crushing, which they can't achieve without American military but to not achieve is de facto a defeat to Israeli invincibility perception.
@simon_brooke and Iran's war objectives are very simple, regime survival and re-establish deterrence, hence the attacks on gulf states and closing the straights, and it seems from the outside they're effectively leveraging what they have.
Coach Pāṇini ®Hormuz is spelled W-A-T-E-R-L-O-O
Claire McNab@simon_brooke You are right that these new military technologies are well-suited to radically distributed production. So long as spidery supply chains function somehow, drones can still be built in quantity.
But I'm not so sure that this is bad news for the USA. The #MilitaryIndustrialComplex loves a #ForeverWar, however much the #MAGA base hates it.
A few decades firing missiles at Iranian mountainsides will be great for business.