why isn't there an F/A-18 overhead 24/7 ready to drop a 2000 pound bomb through the deck of any suspicious ship approaching the island? we have air dominance, right?
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why isn't there an F/A-18 overhead 24/7 ready to drop a 2000 pound bomb through the deck of any suspicious ship approaching the island? we have air dominance, right?
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50Pretty sure even the Pentagon isnt dumb enough to telegraph this so far in advance.
I saw a video (real/notreal/whocares) where an F18 got tagged by a MANPAD so that was pretty cool and novel to see.
I'd expect they have problems just patrolling. It was supposed to be a three day campaign you see, and we don't have too many assets on hand....
Unless they are using POWs as human shields. Didn't they supposedly capture a bunch of Navy Seals?
my guess is they're going to try to seize the port of chabahar
The island close enough to the coast that speed boats and subs could carry men and man portable materials. its close to the mountainous coast which can hide SAMS. so constant coverage isn't safe.
oh Kharg is right there? I thought it was in the strait. Well they still hold the base in Kuwait so turn around times for aircraft should be short and they can refill ships from there
The fact normies even know the word "karg" seems psy-oppy to me, like they want to engineer one plausible victory that sticks in the public mind before a dignified "peace treaty" where nothing really changes too much, but they can shrug and tell the jews they tried.
That isn't going to be a whole lot easier to do than seizing Kharg Island, just less overtly suicidal, and they'd have to go for a major port area to be able to offload supplies.
I have no doubt the US could achieve a landing somewhere, even if contested and taking serious causalities. My question is how the US plans to hold any landing once achieved.
Exactly. Drones, rockets, missiles, artillery. No close air support.
Amphibious landing that immediately results in urban combat
Unless you can encircle the city. They did that a lot in Iraq.
from the sea? with no air assets?
The Iraqi army was surrendering en-masse to advancing US forces. Nothing about the situation is comparable.
Was made up of gibs from the Soviets and Uncle Sam during the Iran Iraq War.
I'm starting to think the end goal isn't a real victory but a plausibly realistic propaganda one. If you were going for effect, (and you were desperately blackmailed & retarded) then you could plan on seizing some port and bottle up the iranians at some mountainous choke point with air assets.
In the office, everyone can pretend you "only need a few thousand marines" and "you can keep their army contained with 24/7 air strikes". If it works then cool! You have a bartering chip for a fake treaty to retreat with the myth of american power intact.
If it doesn't work....well, a few thousand dead GIs would surely galvanize the public into WWII-level mobilization, no?
Iran is a near peer. They haven't faced actual combat yet. Lobbing a bunch of missiles isn't actual war. Maybe they are so focused on rockets that their actual Army is like Pakistans. I know literally nothing about their capabilities. I'm pretty sure we'd fuck up Pakistan or Indian troops. Iran hasnt had a war in 45 years. They have no troops with combat experience.
We are all just assuming they have this great army. I have no idea. We might be safer on the ground than in the water.
or iran can simply ignore them and tell us to pull them out or they'll completely destroy the gulf state oil infrastructure and close the strait permanently
I'm less convinced that they are some insurmountable force. Who knows.
Drones are definitely a huge factor. Im sure they have a plan to deal with them. No idea what that is.
if we spent the next 20 years reindustrializing the US and expanding the US military to 5x its current strength then sure, we could go squash iran
sometimes the enemy is just too strong to defeat at a reasonable cost. we don't have to take every single fight
True. But we have a professional military. There is some semblance of discipline in the ranks. I have no idea if Iran has a professional army. Maybe they have been investing everything into these rockets at the expense of the army. They didn't really have much of an air force or navy apparently.
I think you are right but apparently someone thinks it's feasible.
Why are we supporting our enemies trade routes while trying for impossible goals? If we could just make the hard choice "should this oil production still exist", yes is an easy to achieve situation, no is an easy to achieve situation, "yes but it should be a democratic nation state" is literally impossible.
it's just totally implausible to me that the US is incapable of carrying out airstrikes on Iran's infrastructure and industrial capacity until they're stuck standing on the shore trying to skip rocks at passing tankers
has the entire defense budget for the past 50 years been nothing but embezzlement while some guy gets paid 14 bucks an hour to duct tape traffic cones to the end of culvert pipes and paint them like missiles?
Yes. Yes and yes.
A lot retired military analysts are, I believe, correctly comparing any US landing in Iran to the Gallipoli campaign of WW1. By all accounts the British and Commonwealth were superior in all regards to the Turks but they could never take advantage of said superiority because the campaign to take the Dardanelles was logistically and strategically impossible.
The same can be said of any US incursion into Iran, barring some massive Gulf War style build up over months (which the military doesn't even have the numbers to pull off anymore). The specific quality of Iranian units is not very important because any landing is not capable of being reinforced or supplied in a meaningful way even if successful.
You are probably right. No idea if the terrain is comparable.
It's very mountainous terrain. Ravines, passes are killboxes. These routes are probably mined already. Kharg Island is probably IED hell.
Studying the great Fedi armchair generals.
we're in a standoff. we're pointing a big gun at them and they're holding a dead man switch that will blow up the world economy if we shoot them
our options are to back off for now, or say fuck it and destroy 30% of the world oil supply in an attack that won't even achieve what greater israel needs out of this war
they simply outplayed us
I don’t honestly have any real way of knowing details; but Persians are an ancient Nation with a proud history of conquest. They’ve been around literal millennia. That they’re *still* around, in a strategically well-defensible land with area comparable to Western Europe, strongly suggests to me they know how to run an Army in defense of their homeland. My two cents
the correct term is ”YoY growth”
You could say the same thing about Greece. Pretty sure we'd have no trouble with them.
What I'm saying is I don't know.
I think ultimately they want normalization. I do think they have been treated unfairly.