Egregoros

Well, where he's right is that Air Supremacy doesn't really work when the enemy can bomb all of your air strips within a few hours flight away.

Fighter jets don't go very far on a tank of fuel, and even if you're trying to do arial refueling, it's a huge pain to try to have to fly hours to put a bomb on a target and then fly hours back again - and your refueling aircraft as also kind of sitting ducks as well.

Iran has just called into question the whole concept of air-first doctrine.

> this was supposed to be a quick little raid, not a full blown total war

Over the past couple of decades I've heard a million variants of "we weren't really fighting to win" - particularly in relation to Afghanistan. I have to admit I'm kind of jaded about it.

When you enter some kind of a conflict and you come out worse off than you started, the correct word for that is Losing.

I think we learn something in every war. What we learned this time is that if a hypersonic can get past interceptors and C-RAM, then it can deny naval access and destroy nearby bases, which completely undermines an air first strategy.

It also challenges how you would even get infantry and equipment into the area to stage a ground invasion. You can't sail too close if they can just shoot your ships.

If interceptors, C-RAM, and DEW can't be improved to the point of beating hypersonics, this might be the end of war as we know it...

@cjd @deprecated_ii Israel wasted a lot of time blowing up police boxes in Tehran is reduce Iran's ability to control any uprising, and at every stage of the conflict there have been appeals to the public for an uprising, and popular uprisings with a great deal of foreign support aren't new. Even just a couple of years ago Ukrainians showed up in Georgia to try and pull one off, and Ukraine in 2014 is a successful example of a coup like this.

Iran has large minority groups and separatist groups that could be mobilized, like the Kurds and the Baluchis and the Azeris.

It might be harder to believe if you haven't heard of any theory where it'd work:
1. foreign money pays people to protest
2. foreign terrorists sneak into the crowds and snipe both police and protesters to turn the crowd violent
3. coincidentally the government is decapitated
4. the government loses legitimacy and already compromised leaders step out to gracefully surrender to the mob. In any case the country falters and can't mount a military resistance

The big failure here was (3), the decapitation came a month after #1 and #2 started, because Trump called off the strikes at the last moment and called in more assets to support the op while Iran crushed the protests. And the called-off op was already late, probably surprised by how effective Iran's suppression was with the internet shutdown and Starlink hunts.

The USS Tripoli just today got into theater. We didn't have any ground assets ready to move because the plan was to support Mossad's ground assets in the country.

Hmm, I see... It sounds at least plausible and I shouldn't fall for the "it didn't happen so it was obviously impossible" bias.

I think one major challenge was the fact that Iran did a major crackdown like 6 months or so ago, also a shitload of deportations. Maybe it was even a year or more ago, but they were definitely planning on this.

But they've been building up their country into a weapon for 40ish years planning on this war, so not exactly the same battle as Ukraine 2014...

I kind of have a feeling that even if 1,2,3 worked out really well, 4 might have failed to land and instead they just shutdown the internet, disappear the protesters, and then proceed with the same plan anyway...