And replaced them with some young fanatics.
And created another generation of little drummer boys/girls.
Mojtaba Khamenei in the past week has lost his father, his wife and a child to US aimed ordinance. Makes for somebody likely to negotiate a settlement, no?
I also note that in the past week the US et al have fired more Patriot missiles (@$3mill each to shoot down Iranian Shahed drones costing $20-50k) than were offered for Ukraine to purchase/use for the past year.
The rationale was the missiles were required for defense against the real enemy.
Whomever that real enemy is, they must be watching on with interest.
If there’s any silver lining, it’s that the USA learned the hard lesson early on now - rather than later - that it’s really lagging behind in anti-drone defenses.
Right. I momentarily forgot that Trump’s words are and have always been meaningless.
Yeah. Trump is a willfully ignorant liar with dementia. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know, and he’s lying about all those things he doesn’t understand in the first place. His blatherings have less than zero information content.
Trying to guess when or if he intends the war to end from what he says is basically playing oracle.
Moderating:
Please keep the Trump rants in a Trump thread. @iiandyiiii reply was not an excuse to rant off-topic.
If I may be permitted a tangent for one message, one of the characteristics of modern war is that the complexity of weapons platforms and systems prevents a country from getting into a true total war stance with the weapons Western countries buy now, because they’re so expensive. As much as the USA is determined to go bankrupt financing the biggest armed forces on Earth, they can’t keep up with demand when a war starts, and we’ve seen hints of this before - the F-22 program was cut way short in large part due to the price tag.
In the SEcond World War, the best American fighter aircraft was the P-51 Mustang. In 1945 dollars, they cost around $50,000, which is, and I’ll deliberately estimate a bit high, about $900,000 now, and fuck, I’ll round it up to a million bucks because that makes the arithmetic easier. Around 15,000 were built, so the P-51 program cost about 15 billion dollars.
That’s… well, okay, so the F-35, by comparison, costs $120 million or so. The US government has bought about 700, so far as I can tell, and that’s a cost of $84 billion.
So to get 700 F-35s has cost several times more than what it cost to have 15000 P-51s. In fact, the F-35 program will probably end up osting about as much as all the fighter planes the USA used in WWIII combined. All of them, every P-38, every Hellcat, every Thunderbolt. The greatest air force ever built in human history.
You simply cannot sustain a full scale war with these weapons. It will degrade into the cheaper grinding war we now see in Ukraine.
World War 3?
Moderating: Clearly a typo. Read the context.
Sorry. But I am concerned this conflict could easily go outside the region
Vessel burning in the Strait of Hormuz. No real details.
One of the heaviest days of bombing yet.
Meanwhile Iran plans to escalate by mining the Strait of Hormuz.
As always, Perun provides some excellent wartime analysis, this time focusing on the missile and interceptor conflict.
As I said the way to “win” or at least not to lose, for Iran is making the consequences of the attack something that hurts.
Closing the Strait of Hormuz for a prolonged period is one of their options, perhaps the best they have.
IMHO they should be able to do so, if not with missiles with more low tech alternatives like mines or with cheaper alternatives like drones, or even speedboats full of fanatics (though they may be easy to detect and sink).
That would leave the U.S. with the alternative of accepting a closed strait or puting boots on the ground on the shore… which would lead to guerilla warfare of the kind that has caused the U.S. so many problems historically.
Of course I could be wrong and may be the U.S. navy can keep the strait open using its far more advanced tech and budget.
I’m so, so very tired.
An historical parallel comes to mind, in 1941 Stalin’s regime was widely thought to be (and probably actually was) completely hated by the Russian population, Hitler thought (I think it’s a quote) that “Just by forcing the door the whole building will fall” or words to that effect.
Perhaps Trump and company fell into the same mistake? or perhaps Iran’s regime is so thoroughly rotten that this time forcing the door will make the whole building go down.
I guess time will tell.
Sinking 16 ships should slow down the laying of mines.
I vaguely remember the UK helped Ukraine clear mines from their ports. There is equipment available to clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz.
It would be better to eliminate the ships that lay mines.
Guardian live blog
However many Iranian minelayer ships have been destroyed, it appears that Iran has lots more resources to drop mines in the strait, according to this CNN story.
The mining is not extensive yet, with a few dozen having been laid in recent days, the sources said. But Iran still retains upward of 80% to 90% of its small boats and mine layers, one of the sources said, so its forces could feasibly lay hundreds of mines in the waterway.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which now effectively controls the strait along with Iran’s traditional navy, has the capability to deploy a “gauntlet” of dispersed mine-laying craft, explosive-laden boats and shore-based missile batteries, CNN has reported.
Was it not possible to secure the Strait of Hormuz at the beginning of the war? Or would the US need to secure the airspace and other targets first?
I realize the strait is not small, but I would have thought the during the last 45 years of war gaming an attack on Iran, the US military would have had a plan – even if the administration does not.