Iran War?

[Jacob]

Maybe his shriveled brain has convinced him he's in a really weird version of Apprentice.

My hypothesis is that he wants vassals. MAGA-type right wing populists governments in various European and Latin American countries can be conceived as vassals because they'll glaze him, and because they'll enable his corruption networks.

In a place like Venezuela, he believes he's replaced the leader with someone more amenable on those two points - they'll cater to Trump's ego rather than be defiant, and they'll facilitate corruption one way or the other. This is the same thing with his Palestinian "board of peace", and was also the template for his "peace" in Ukraine.

The approach to Iran is the same: "we have lots of power, we're going to swing it around and break shit until you start sucking up to me by acting like a vassal - in this case let me "have a say" in picking the leader - and help me facilitate my oligarch cronies and family pocketing more wealth."

He wants to be the top mafia boss in the world, and he's happy to use the US military to that end.

[Jacob]

Incidentally this is purely vibes based - but I am not like or remotely reassured by any of the mood music coming out of DC right now.

Care to elaborate?

[Sheilbh]

Care to elaborate?

Sadly, as I say, no analysis just vibes. It just feels like everything I'm seeing feels like this is going worse and turing out to be more difficult than they anticipated. I also think there seems to be a degree of surprise at the extent of Iran's response and capacity to respond (both in terms of domestic resilience and counter strikes).

As I say just on the mood music no real statements or anything I've read to get there.

[mongers]

Edit: Incidentally this is purely vibes based - but I am not like or remotely reassured by any of the mood music coming out of DC right now.

Can't you call if for what it is, Bullshit.   

[Tonitrus]

Pictures of the ship clearly show a gun on it (and it had much more armament potential than that).

There's a claim going around that one of the conditions for Exercise MILAN (which is what the Iranian ship was participating in) was that all participating ships be in "peace protocol" (whatever that means), and the Iranian ambassador to India claims that Dena wasn't carrying live ammunition.  Information is scant, though.  This is the best I have found so far.

If so, that is fair.  And worse if we knew that (and perhaps also inexcusable if we were in a situation where we didn't know).  Though I am skeptical even the most stringent "peace protocol" meant that it had zero live ordinance...I cannot imagine us ever doing the same.

I'm no squid...but it still appeared to me as if it would have been easy to alternately signal/demand the ship surrender or intern in port, and only sink it if it insisted on sailing back home from Sri Lanka (as I presume there is quite a bit of the USN physically between those places at the moment).

Instead, it gives the appearance that we punk'd a potentially militarily impotent target for the lulz.

[Sheilbh]

Can't you call if for what it is, Bullshit.   

Oh that would involve listening to what's being said I mean the opposite.

[Jacob]

Sadly, as I say, no analysis just vibes. It just feels like everything I'm seeing feels like this is going worse and turing out to be more difficult than they anticipated. I also think there seems to be a degree of surprise at the extent of Iran's response and capacity to respond (both in terms of domestic resilience and counter strikes).

As I say just on the mood music no real statements or anything I've read to get there.

Oh I see. Yeah.

The real question IMO is whether they find themselves a nice off ramp somewhere, whether they just kind of stop and pretend nothing ever happened, or whether they continue throwing more resources at Iran.

I'd love to see some good credible analysis of where Iran is and what it would likely take to affect regime change.

Because from where I'm sitting that's basically the victory condition Trump has defined for himself. And as of yet, they don't really seem near achieving them.

So what's next? Killing more potential leadership candidates? Boots on the ground? Blowing up so much of Iran that they can't shoot back at all?

[Valmy]

I am starting to realize I am getting fed a lot of unconfirmed garbage by the internet with regards to this war. So I will probably just stop following it closely. Besides this is a lose-lose proposition. If the US does well, it will just encourage Trump to launch the next attack. If it goes poorly...well that's bad to.

However give me a second to rage againt my party. The goddamn Democratic Party. What a bunch of fuckers. Even in a totally symbolic vote to curb the war powers of the President, which would have been vetoed anyway, we had fuckers breaking ranks to suck Trump cock.

[crazy canuck]

I am sorry but there are American naval forces launching strikes against Iran aren't they? It would be irresponsible not to cripple the enemy's navy to the best of their abilities. It's a stupid war with a strategic disaster written all over it, but that doesn't mean they are forced to wage it in a stupid way on the tactical level.

The United States has not declared war on Iran.  We are more in the Putinesque sphere of some sort of special presidential operation involving a lot of US military power.

It looks like the key difference would be that president didn't seek authorisation to use force. After all, the US hasn't actually formally declared war since...WW2?

.


Yes, that's more what I meant

[Zanza]

I read an interesting analysis that suggests Iran may have made a major strategic mistake in how it designed is ballistic missile system.

Years ago, Iran started storing a large % of their ballistic missiles in underground facilities dubbed "missile cities." Iran was very proud of these facilities and regularly would release videos from inside of them, basically showing these underground warehouses full of missiles--largely safe from any aerial bombing risk.

However, the reason this has become a problem--you can't launch missiles from an underground missile city. They have to be loaded onto a missile launcher and then moved out of the underground facility to a launch site. It appears Israel and the U.S. know where all these missile cities are. And it's also true that they are usually too deep for easy destruction via bombing.

But what is being done is they are now parking slow moving surveillance planes over the missile cities, and the second a missile launcher tries to drive out of the underground area, they notify the attack forces which immediately come in and destroy the missile launcher.

Israel and the U.S. have also been collapsing the entrances to the missile cities in some locations, effectively sealing their munitions underground.

One analysis in the WSJ suggested this was a strategic blunder by Iran--one of the big advantages of these mobile missile launchers is precisely that they are mobile. But if they have to go to well known "missile city" depots to get armed, they now have to centralize themselves instead of decentralize. Israel and the U.S. appear to have been effectively making it near impossible for Iran to make use of these missile cities, and in fact their very existence is making it much easier for the IDF and U.S. to destroy Iranian missile launchers, because the entire strategic premise of them forces the missile launchers to visit well known, centralized areas. That same analysis also said that in strategic terms--a missile launcher is much more valuable to Iran than missiles. Its production pipeline for missiles is easier to ramp up than it is for launchers, so as it is losing launchers trying to escape the missile cities it has limited means of producing more in the short term.

It isn't known exactly what % of Iran's ballistic missile stockpile are in missile cities, but it's believed to be a large chunk of the total.

My suspicion is the premise of the missile cities was an assumption of a more limited war with Israel in which Israel wouldn't have air superiority, e.g. it was insurance against a surprise attack destroying huge above ground missile stockpiles. It seems Iran didn't consider the implications if Israel attacked alongside the U.S. and established aerial supremacy, turning the missile cities into easily neutralized facilities.

Consequently this is likely the single biggest reason Iran's ballistic missiles launches have declined by 90% since war began last weekend.

For Israel in particular this is huge--Iran's ballistic missiles are the primary threat now that Iran poses to Israel (particularly since its Axis of Resistance is in tatters.)

Unfortunately for the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf Oil states, those areas are being hit primarily by Iran's cheaply made drones, the closer distances involved meaning it doesn't need to use its ballistic missiles to reliably hit targets in those locations.

Sounds plausible, but also means that just unilaterally stopping this war is not an option as Iran can then fix this strategic flaw and start moving and then using these systems. Permanent air supremacy surely is costly.

[Sophie Scholl]

However give me a second to rage againt my party. The goddamn Democratic Party. What a bunch of fuckers. Even in a totally symbolic vote to curb the war powers of the President, which would have been vetoed anyway, we had fuckers breaking ranks to suck Trump cock.

All four are large AIPAC beneficiaries. Probably a total coincidence... 

[Jacob]

Yeah @Zanza and @OvB - maybe those missiles can't be brought to bear right now, but unless the regime falls or the missiles are completely destroyed, presumably they'll be properly deployed at some point in the future.