I’m not saying I want us to fight them, or that it’ll be the first Gulf War over again, but that Iran’s not too much of a force-on-force threat. Yes, we’ll certainly suffer casualties, but in terms of actually winning vs. their military straight-up, that’s not too much in debate.
They’d be smart to use asymmetrical tactics, if they engage at all. I still haven’t figured out what it would buy them to engage militarily.
And the nonsense about not winning a war in 70 years is just that, nonsense. Every time our military has fought other militaries, we’ve won. Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I and 2. The problem is that in most cases, there haven’t been clear victory conditions, or we’ve been fighting insurgencies with political constraints that hinder the ability to actually fight the insurgencies.
Case in point- Iraq. What would have counted as a win? The military decisively stomped their actual military into pulp in 2003, but then were cast into a quagmire where there weren’t any conclusive goals for the military to work toward.
That’s been the general problem- politicians look at the military as a general-purpose tool, when in fact, it’s a tool with very specific applications- i.e. fighting other militaries. But since it’s quickly deployable, accountable and mobile, they tend to like to send it to do stuff that it’s not really trained or intended to do.