War with...Iran?

[Soriak]

If they send in any kind of ground forces, they're not going to engage in direct combat, especially not urban combat against a much larger armed force.

Of course not. They're special forces. They're not pulling up in tanks for 1-on-1 combat. But also: they extracted the president of Venezuela with zero fatalities on their side. Might be worth considering that they're pretty good at their jobs.

No they will do what IDF did in Gaza, indiscriminate air cover because they're not going in clearing buildings with just rifles or going into the tunnels.

Tunnels on Kharg Island? Yeah, this isn't fighting Hamas. Although Hamas is a great example of how overwhelming military force can be successful. Not hearing so much from them as of late.

They're very likely there to secure strategic choke points. The US has air supremacy over Iran, and so this is the time to drop in some paratroopers and take control of strategic points.

No, I don't think Trump is personally picking those points... because no president would. But there are plenty of brilliant generals and admirals who have been updating plans on Iran every few months for the past few years. People who are very, very good at what they do and whose job it is to offer plans to the president that are ready to execute. Now, they're executing.

So they will raze city blocks so that ground forces doesn't have to get into protracted gunfire battles.

They will not because they're not going to deploy into city centers. They will try to do enough damage to the IRGC that they can ferment an uprising. I don't think anyone could have missed that Iranians were willing to die by the tens of thousands to overthrow this oppressive regime...

Our government sucks, and there is a distressingly large number of people who think that's a bonus.

I desperately miss the naivety of my early 20s, when I didn't realize yet we were the baddies.

I would highly encourage you to read up on the actions of the Iranian regime before thinking you're on the wrong side of history here. Wasn't that long ago when murdering women for not wearing a headscarf was considered a bad thing among liberals.

 

[SunRaven01]

I would highly encourage you to read up on the actions of the Iranian regime before thinking you're on the wrong side of history here. Wasn't that long ago when murdering women for not wearing a headscarf was considered a bad thing among liberals.

There might be someone here whose opinions I count as being of less value than yours, but I'd have to think a long time to come up with a name.

I highly encourage you to not make the mistake of assuming you know anything about what I think about how history will view us.

 

[NewNinetyNine]

We all recognize that there is no existential threat to Israel as long as the U.S. continues to back it. But if that backing ever falters....

And it's not correct to say the issue is "there are neighbors that don't like them". Since 1979 it has been official state policy of Iran to eliminate the state of Israel, for instance.

Sure, and it has been my "official state policy" to marry Cindy Crawford since I was 10 years old. But that doesn't mean anything if there is no path to actioning that policy.

Again, when you're flush with enough nuclear weapons to destroy every population center in the Middle East, you do not require US backing to survive militarily. And this is completely ignoring the lack of force projection possible by these supposed conquering neighbors, the shambolic state of their individual and collective militaries, or how completely fragile their economies are to kinetic disruption (as we are seeing right now). You're creating a risk without a path to justify simple aggression.

 

[Soriak]

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the smaller geopolitical bombs Iran is sitting on. If the IRGC are convinced that it is their last day, they can make it everyone else’s as well.

They're evidently willing to target civilian populations, commit war crimes, and based on your own assessment may be willing to murder 90% of the population in the middle east. Seems like we should probably do something to stop them from having nuclear weapons, no? Doesn't sound like they would be very reasonable actors if they had access to those, particularly given their stated goal of destroying the state of Israel. I'm starting to see why their neighbors don't like them and are increasingly signaling that they are willing to join the strikes against them.

 

[Pino90]

They're evidently willing to target civilian populations, commit war crimes, and based on your own assessment may be willing to murder 90% of the population in the middle east. Seems like we should probably do something to stop them from having nuclear weapons, no? Doesn't sound like they would be very reasonable actors if they had access to those, particularly given their stated goal of destroying the state of Israel. I'm starting to see why their neighbors don't like them and are increasingly signaling that they are willing to join the strikes against them.

If only Trump could've done something to avoid this retaliation like, you know, not starting this war. Then we, the rest of the fucking world, wouldn't, you know, have to deal with this crap.

But you already know this and you're intentionally ignoring it.

 

[flere-imsaho]

Sure, and it has been my "official state policy" to marry Cindy Crawford since I was 10 years old. But that doesn't mean anything if there is no path to actioning that policy.

With the greatest respect, this is a terrible analogy.

 

[Soriak]

There might be someone here whose opinions I count as being of less value than yours, but I'd have to think a long time to come up with a name.

I highly encourage you to not make the mistake of assuming you know anything about what I think about how history will view us.

You don't have to value my opinion or anything I say. All I was responding to is that if you think in a conflict between the IRGC (not the Iranian population) and the US government, you think the US are the bad guys... maybe that's worth reflecting on how that opinion was arrived at.

You can protest ICE shooting someone in a car ostensibly driving at an agent and read about those protests online. The Iranian regime will beat to death a woman who doesn't wear her headscarf, engages in systematic rape, and has executed tens of thousands of civilians while cutting off internet access to make sure you can't see videos of that happening. We have actual video of security forces driving around trucks with machine guns on the back gunning down civilians from people who risked execution for using Starlink (and who may well be dead now).

There aren't any angles in the world, but I don't particularly struggle to make a relative judgment here. And I don't see a whole lot of Americans moving to Iran to pursue their dream of freedom. (We know of Canadian morons who went there on a tour, because they're now held in an Iranian prison -- not that their government seems to care a whole lot.)

If only Trump could've done something to avoid this retaliation like, you know, not starting this war. Then we, the rest of the fucking world, wouldn't, you know, have to deal with this crap.

But you already know this and you're intentionally ignoring it.

Sure, Iran would never support Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and other actors of terrorism if the US hadn't started this war. We should really just leave them to their domestic affairs. If they want to slaughter their civilian population, who are we to judge? (Hey, a lot of people thought the US shouldn't get involved in WW2 either. If we just stay out of conflicts, nothing bad could possibly happen to us.)

 

[cgo_12345]

Sure looks like he's angling to do that. Trump is infallible of course so this is so either Hegseth's fault or common information that no one could have possibly known.
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5796691-trump-hegseth-iran-war-support/

I mean it won't make anything better but at least it'll schaden my freude.

 

[NewNinetyNine]

They're evidently willing to target civilian populations, commit war crimes, and based on your own assessment may be willing to murder 90% of the population in the middle east. Seems like we should probably do something to stop them from having nuclear weapons, no? Doesn't sound like they would be very reasonable actors if they had access to those, particularly given their stated goal of destroying the state of Israel. I'm starting to see why their neighbors don't like them and are increasingly signaling that they are willing to join the strikes against them.

The entire world is built on mutually-assured destruction.

This is like saying "the US is willing to depopulate 100% the earth with nuclear weapons if it is backed into an existential corner, so it should be invaded and leveled." Or China. Or Russia.

MAD exists to make war too costly to pursue against countries with sufficient deterrent force. Whether that is nuclear counter-strikes or regional infrastructure attacks.

 

[Macam]

Our government sucks, and there is a distressingly large number of people who think that's a bonus.

I desperately miss the naivety of my early 20s, when I didn't realize yet we were the baddies.

I don't want to stray too far into domestic politics but, boy oh boy, do I never want to hear anyone ever say "We can't afford {x}" ever again (let alone, "generational theft", "judicial activism", "legislating from the bench", "original textualist", etc etc).

We could feed and house every person in this country for a fraction of what we're spending killing children and families, and pursuing deranged autocrats' geopolitical fantasies.

Instead, we're doing this:



Link



Link

 

[NewNinetyNine]

With the greatest respect, this is a terrible analogy.

With the greatest of respect, simply saying so isn't going to make this post convincing.

Please describe how other countries in the region could destroy Israel existentially without being glassed by nukes. After fighting through the teeth of the dominant regional military power.

 

[flere-imsaho]

You don't have to value my opinion or anything I say. All I was responding to is that if you think in a conflict between the IRGC (not the Iranian population) and the US government, you think the US are the bad guys... maybe that's worth reflecting on how that opinion was arrived at.

In a vacuum, the IRGC are unambiguously worse than the Trump Administration from a moral standpoint (though, give the Trump Administration time...).

In the context of responsibility for all who have died / will die plus hardship caused by the unilateral decision by the U.S. and Israel to start bombing a few weeks ago, the U.S. (and Israel) are "the baddies".

In the further potential context that nothing about this engagement fundamentally changes things such as the Iranian ruling regime, attacks by proxies on Israel, further unrest in the Middle East, the U.S. are also "the baddies".

 

[Soriak]

The entire world is built on mutually-assured destruction.

There's no mutually assured destruction here. Iran has had over a hundred ships sunk vs. zero US ships. The US has now confirmed 9,000 destroyed targets (not including those hit by Israel), with Iran landing a few shots. Iran's senior leadership as of a month ago is no longer alive, and the current "leader" has not been seen on video since his appointment and is reportedly in Moscow. The losses are very much accruing primarily on one side. Yeah, Iran called for a fatwah against Trump... also against Salman Rushdie, who's still alive and kicking (you'd think Ars posters would be sympathetic to an author who has survived state-sponsored assassination attempts for the crime of writing fiction, but who knows these days).

I don't want to stray too far into domestic politics but, boy oh boy, do I never want to hear anyone ever say "We can't afford {x}" ever again (let alone, "generational theft", "judicial activism", "legislating from the bench", "original textualist", etc etc).

We could feed and house every person in this country for a fraction of what we're spending killing children and families, and pursuing deranged autocrats' geopolitical fantasies.

No, we couldn't. The requested funding for the Iran war is a one-off $200bn. Universal health care, on its own, would cost on the order of $3tn per year. That's off by an order of magnitude even for just one year, never mind that it would be a recurring annual expense.

 

[Pino90]

Sure, Iran would never support Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and other actors of terrorism if the US hadn't started this war. We should really just leave them to their domestic affairs. If they want to slaughter their civilian population, who are we to judge? (Hey, a lot of people thought the US shouldn't get involved in WW2 either. If we just stay out of conflicts, nothing bad could possibly happen to us.)

Your reply is disingenuous and dishonest because you shifted the goalpost entirely (as usual).

I replied specifically about the retaliation you mentioned, which is to close the strait and to target desalinization infrastructure. This was totally avoidable by the US. All you guys had to do was not to go there.
Now you're arguing something else altogether, hiding behind a textbook straw man.

Here in the SB we usually don't fall for that.

 

[Soriak]

In the context of responsibility for all who have died / will die plus hardship caused by the unilateral decision by the U.S. and Israel to start bombing a few weeks ago, the U.S. (and Israel) are "the baddies".

Out of curiosity: do you think the US were the baddies in World War 2? Quite a lot of German civilians were killed. The US even deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, city centers, etc. The US also did not destroy the train tracks that were used to transport Jews to the concentration camps and to their deaths.

"Good" and "Bad" are terribly useless terms in politics. Yeah, everyone sucks. But I'm still going to judge the people who think a regime that straps machine guns onto the back of a truck to gun down civilian protesters is engaging in "rational deterrance." And I'm going to judge the people who think stopping said regime from acquiring nuclear weapons and from providing continuous support to various terrorist organizations (Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah) is somehow a grave human rights violation.

I think it's quite telling that none of Iran's neighbors are rushing to their defense. But hey, you can always side with Russia on this one...

 

[Soriak]

Your reply is disingenuous and dishonest because you shifted the goalpost entirely (as usual).

I replied specifically about the retaliation you mentioned, which is to close the strait and to target desalinization infrastructure. This was totally avoidable by the US. All you guys had to do was not to go there.

Sure? If you see someone get beaten up or raped in the street, you can also avoid all problems by just choosing to walk away. Totally avoidable conflict. Just pretend you didn't see bad things and life goes on great. You have to know the perpetrator could lash out and you and others and it's clearly best not to agonize them.

 

[Scotttheking]

We're at close to 10,000 US elite forces publicly known to be on the way to Iran.


View: https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2036492670382518602?s=20

If they send in any kind of ground forces, they're not going to engage in direct combat, especially not urban combat against a much larger armed force.

Of course not. They're special forces. They're not pulling up in tanks for 1-on-1 combat. But also: they extracted the president of Venezuela with zero fatalities on their side. Might be worth considering that they're pretty good at their jobs.

Your post links to an 82nd Airborne deployment. Then when called out about ground forces, you shift to talking about special forces. Can't really reply when you keep shifting the goalposts.

 

[Zod]

What is likely to be the case is that the IRGC will not be running the country in a few more weeks. And if you're at all saddened by this, you might want to read up on the recent slaughter of civilian protesters, beatings of women, mass executions, and their infamous prisons for political dissidents (including Canadian tourists, whose government I'm sure is very concerned).

You keep posting this, despite the fact that not a single person in the thread has expressed support for, or excused, the actions of the IRGC.

 

[SuinusLatinus]

But there are plenty of brilliant generals and admirals who have been updating plans on Iran every few months for the past few years. People who are very, very good at what they do

, except noticing where schools are. A shame those updated plans don't have room for those little details.

 

[flere-imsaho]

With the greatest of respect, simply saying so isn't going to make this post convincing.

Iran actively funds terrorist groups that kill Israelis and destroys infrastructure. Please provide evidence of your attempts to marry Cindy Crawford so as to legitimize your terrible analogy.

Please describe how other countries in the region could destroy Israel existentially without being glassed by nukes. After fighting through the teeth of the dominant regional military power.

Attrition. In a world where the U.S. no longer backstops & funds Israel, there are two main ramifications.

First, Israel's ability to keep its military lead is compromised without the massive funding it gets from the U.S. This means the periodic attacks meant to degrade regional rivals become less frequent, and end up ceasing altogether.

Second, until such a point where the opposing militaries are on even footing (which could take decades), there is no need for Israel's adversaries to fight directly, when funding proxy actions is effective. As Israel's budget withers, attacks such as October 7 become more regular, along with suicide bombings, sabotage of key infrastructure, etc.... Over a prolonged period emigration increases and the concept of the state itself withers.

All of this is enabled by things such as Iran having the elimination of Israel as a state as part of its official policy.

Let's try a better analogy. NFL teams like to have a "no turnovers" mantra. However, going through a season with 0 turnovers is essentially an impossibility. So, why focus on it? Why have it? Because it encourages and enables and ingrains a specific behavior.

Lastly, it's fun to blithely suggest that Israel could just nuke all those major population centers, but consider what happens to Israel in a world where it does this, again, without U.S. protection. A pariah state completely cut off from the world economic system is probably the best case result from such an action.

 

[Soriak]

Your post links to an 82nd Airborne deployment. Then when called out about ground forces, you shift to talking about special forces. Can't really reply when you keep shifting the goalposts.

Sorry, they're part of the "global response force" that can deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours, which is different from special forces. It turns out those also seem to different from the global rapid response forces that can, apparently, deploy even faster. Hard to keep track! But my understanding still is that they're not part of the regular troops.

You keep posting this, despite the fact that not a single person in the thread has expressed support for, or excused, the actions of the IRGC.

While also carefully not condemning those actions and, in previous posts, casting doubts on whether those actions did in fact occur. And the posts sure are advocating for restraint against the IRGC and supporting actions that would benefit the IRGC, while laying moral blame on the US. It's getting increasingly hard to see the difference between this and what someone who would support or excuse the actions of the IRGC would advocate for.

 

[flere-imsaho]

Out of curiosity: do you think the US were the baddies in World War 2? Quite a lot of German civilians were killed. The US even deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, city centers, etc. The US also did not destroy the train tracks that were used to transport Jews to the concentration camps and to their deaths.

Who started WW2, Soriak?

 

[Pino90]

Sure? If you see someone get beaten up or raped in the street, you can also avoid all problems by just choosing to walk away. Totally avoidable conflict. Just pretend you didn't see bad things and life goes on great. You have to know the perpetrator could lash out and you and others and it's clearly best not to agonize them.

Another straw man. Can you please stick to what I've actually said and reply to that instead of making shit up?

 

[Scotttheking]

But my understanding still is that they're not part of the regular troops.

Well then time to get learning!

 

[Scotttheking]

Out of curiosity: do you think the US were the baddies in World War 2? Quite a lot of German civilians were killed. The US even deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, city centers, etc. The US also did not destroy the train tracks that were used to transport Jews to the concentration camps and to their deaths.

Roosevelt is president, an accuracy rate of 10% is considered good, and the Swiss are busy laundering stolen money and art for the Nazis? What does that have to do with now?

 

[thunderous_funker]

"Good" and "Bad" are terribly useless terms in politics. Yeah, everyone sucks. But I'm still going to judge the people who think a regime that straps machine guns onto the back of a truck to gun down civilian protesters is engaging in "rational deterrance." And I'm going to judge the people who think stopping said regime from acquiring nuclear weapons and from providing continuous support to various terrorist organizations (Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah) is somehow a grave human rights violation.

I think it's quite telling that none of Iran's neighbors are rushing to their defense. But hey, you can always side with Russia on this one...

Did you just wander in from the Operation Enduring Freedom 2001 thread?

Seriously. What basic fundamental lesson about the limits of military power to achieve "moral" aims have you not learned in the last 20+ years (or ever)? This disastrous war is the utter failure of every single aspect of moral statecraft starting with Trump shredding the JCPOA.

Rationalizing an unprovoked war as a defense of Human Rights is either stupidity on stilts or psyops. Pathetic.

 

[flere-imsaho]

Universal health care, on its own, would cost on the order of $3tn per year

So, less than we spend now, then.

$200B would cover 2/5ths of all annual prescription drug spending in the United States (and that's with the current web of differing reimbursement rates, as opposed to a single rate that would exist under UHC).

 

[Hangfire]

In furtherance of @Scotttheking 's post

It doesn't say Special Forces there. At all.

U.S. Army Special Forces Command (1st SFC) is a component of USASOC (U.S. Army Special Operations Command).
Active Duty units:

The Special Forces Groups (The Green Berets):
1st SFG (A): Pacific region (Joint Base Lewis-McChord, WA).

3rd SFG (A): Sub-Saharan Africa (Fort Liberty, NC).

5th SFG (A): Middle East and Central Asia (Fort Campbell, KY).

7th SFG (A): Latin America and the Caribbean (Eglin AFB, FL).

10th SFG (A): Europe and North Africa (Fort Carson, CO).

National Guard:

19th SFG (A): Covers SW Asia and the Pacific (Utah).

20th SFG (A): Covers Latin America and the Gulf of Mexico (Alabama).

Psychological Operations (PSYOP):
4th Psychological Operations Group

8th Psychological Operations Group

Civil Affairs (CA)

95th Civil Affairs Brigade

Special Forces Sustainment

528th Sustainment Brigade

Now for everyone who falls UNDER US Special Operations Command.

1st Special Forces Command: (All the people I listed above)

75th Ranger Regiment

160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR)

John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS)

Naval Special Warfare Command (NSWC)

SEAL Teams: Organized into various "Groups" (Group 1, 2, 8, and 10).

Special Boat Teams (SWCC)

Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC)

Special Operations Wings (SOW)

Special Tactics Squadrons (STS): Home to Combat Controllers (CCT), Pararescuemen (PJ), and Special Reconnaissance (SR) airmen.

Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC)

Marine Raider Regiment

Marine Raider Support Group

So going through all that... I don't see the 82nd Airborne division at all. Either under US Army Special Forces Command or under United States Special Operations Command.

 

[Nazgutek]

No, we couldn't. The requested funding for the Iran war is a one-off $200bn. Universal health care, on its own, would cost on the order of $3tn per year. That's off by an order of magnitude even for just one year, never mind that it would be a recurring annual expense.

Currently the population of the USA spends around $4.5tn per year on health care, so with some level of taxation (with words like insurance, national, health in it so that the pickup-truck-driving-NRA types don't get bent out of shape) the population of the USA would save around $5k a year on healthcare insurance. If you drop that saving to $4k a year, you could afford one and a half Iran wars every year.

Oh hang on, were you not advocating for Universal Healthcare? My bad.

 

[karolus]

@karolus - what you see as a "war" I see as the latest skirmish in a centuries-old power struggle between two religions over pieces of geography they deem critically important. So, IMO, fundamentalism started this war. More importantly, fundamentalism enables it to be prolonged.

Religion had nothing to do with starting this skirmish—unless Jeffrey Epstein happened to be clergy. Essentially what this boils down to is a major power dunking on a long-term manufactured adversary in the hopes of distracting from a domestic scandal. The Trump Administration thought pulling this off would be as easy as their recent forays in Venezuela. As is now plain for everyone to see, it certainly isn't. Instead, we are witnessing another example of protracted asymmetric warfare.

The geography also mattered little—except that Iran is far removed from the United States, and posed no credible threat. Even the Trump Administration hasn't given forth any plans of redrawing the borders of the region.

Trump wanted a distraction, plain and simple. If his administration had any sense, they would have picked a target like Grenada, which served that purpose for Reagan. Instead, he may have precipitated a global economic recession which has the potential to cause far more problems for him than the Epstein Affair ever could. It also shows a callous disregard for people who had nothing to do his issues. This includes Americans who are now thrust into the line of fire.

 

[Megalodon]

I find the view that you cannot win these conflicts with traditional military force pretty interesting.

Not really any response needed here other than providing correct goalposts for you to address. The US cannot achieve any coherent set of objectives.

-Can the US deny Iran the ability to export oil via Kharg island? Sure. But it could already do that. Instead, it dropped sanctions.
-Can the US take Kharg island? Maybe. But then, what does that achieve other than denying Iran the ability to export oil, which as already stated, it could already do.
-Can the US appropriate Iranian oil by taking Kharg island? No, they'll just stop pumping from the other end.
-What does the US achieve by taking and holding Kharg island? Unclear. It doesn't provide control of the strait, that is excluded by forces on the Iranian mainland. It also exposes US forces to very easy attack from the mainland. This means high casualties, for as long as the US is deployed there, without any resilient avenue of retreat, and without providing a beachhead to any further objectives.
-Any naval vessels attempting to reach the island have to make it through the strait and along the gulf where they will be vulnerable to attack from the mainland. US naval vessels, at least some, have defenses that can stop all the ways Iran has to attack, but Iran can afford a lot of weapons to cause mediagenic casualties and damage to US vessels.

Basically it is a ludicrously exposed position, with no resilient supply lines or avenues of retreat, that doesn't further any intelligible objectives, that couldn't have already been achieved by easier means. This is why the US can't "win" here. Not because it can't blow something up or take a particular island, but because those are not sensible victory conditions. This is only a win in the slapstick pratfall "I meant to do that" sense, that is to say a forlorn attempt to retain the tatters of one's dignity after a humiliation.

If the US were marshaling the forces necessary to actually effect regime change we'd know about it because everyone would be getting called up and posting about it on social media. Also, that funding for the war would probably have to pass at some point.

For one, it's easy to think of historical counterexamples (do people think Germans couldn't have mounted an insurgency?). But also, a lot of this is just common sense: when you eliminate leadership, it creates a domestic power vacuum and different factions will try to fill it.

That's true if you have a top heavy dictatorship configured to set internal constituencies against each other to prevent them from challenging the guy at the top. That's what the Trump regime is. But that's not how Iran is set up. It's broad based (though by no means universal) and distributed. As we've seen, when the people at the top were taken out, there was a few days of disjoint actions, but everything pretty much cohered around a unified strategy soon after.

What is likely to be the case is that the IRGC will not be running the country in a few more weeks.

Not really anything that needs to be said in response to this, I'm just quoting it so we can all look back on your predictive powers at the appropriate time.

 

[redleader]

I don't see a reason for Trump to care, because as he put it, "we don't use the strait." The world would be lucky if Iran let ships use the strait with a toll, because ships moving is better for the world economy than ships not moving.

He would start to care when the economy went into the toilet and gas was >$5 a gallon in red states.

 

[Lycanthropos]

I strongly doubt he has the ability to relate that issue to his current actions; that's at least two steps removed as a consequence, and he's not exactly great at seeing that far ahead.

 

[karolus]

Trump is a salesman at heart—and a bad one at that—except when it comes to promoting his own brand. It's how he got to where he is now. Paradoxically, he may be commanding the world's attention right now—but not in a manner favorable to him.

It's understandable—he's been able to do what he's done for most of his life without facing major negative consequences. A type of failing upward. He bungled the pandemic and committed insurrection, but was rewarded with a second stint in the White House. With Iran, he may have gotten a bit over his skis.

 

[Megalodon]

Of course not. They're special forces. They're not pulling up in tanks for 1-on-1 combat.

What objectives do you suggest they will be attempting to achieve? If you're suggesting they can blow something up that is lightly or moderately defended, they quite possibly can, but taking and holding territory against indirect fire really isn't what that kind of force is good at. They'd need to be mobile and they'd need to be able to maneuver and withdraw. Not really setting them up for success bottling them up on a tiny island.

Tunnels on Kharg Island? Yeah, this isn't fighting Hamas. Although Hamas is a great example of how overwhelming military force can be successful. Not hearing so much from them as of late.

I was thinking more, ballistic missiles and shaheds from the mainland. Consider that Iran really doesn't need to take the island back by force, they just need to erode US support for the war by causing mediagenic casualties, which they can do by indirect fire from the mainland. Any forces on the island, and any ships in the area, will be extremely vulnerable. I've seen people talk about submarines, but clearly not people that have consulted nautical charts for the gulf—it's shallow enough that I'd be nervous about running a submarine through there on the surface outside of the designated shipping channels.

This is the kind of blinkered analysis it takes to think this is a good idea. What are they there to do, why, to what end, and how? What then? If you take an island only to dodge shaheds for the next 6 months, what does that achieve other than doing what could already have been done much more simply by not easing Iran sanctions?

In other words, this is obviously deploying US forces to a prepared kill zone, and the ability to do that is not the advantage you seem to think it is.

They're very likely there to secure strategic choke points.

The choke point is the entire strait and gulf, and the area needed to secure it is the entire Iranian coast and inland for a few hundred miles. Might be doable with a quarter million troops and a few trillion dollars. Definitely won't be with the force being deployed now.

They will not because they're not going to deploy into city centers. They will try to do enough damage to the IRGC that they can ferment an uprising.

No promise of this has ever been fulfilled. It is exclusively propaganda to lowball the commitment needed to do something, in the hopes that sunk cost fallacy will support what could never have been sold to the public on its merits. This attempt will fail.

I would highly encourage you to read up on the actions of the Iranian regime before thinking you're on the wrong side of history here. Wasn't that long ago when murdering women for not wearing a headscarf was considered a bad thing among liberals.

They're not the good guys, but neither are the only bad guys. And the problem with that is that bad guys at the top are effectively each other's biggest supporters. Trump is strengthening the IRGC. No better way to support a totalitarian regime than by proving beyond any doubt the vicious murderous external threat they set themselves against is absolutely as bad as they claim.

 

[redleader]

I strongly doubt he has the ability to relate that issue to his current actions; that's at least two steps removed as a consequence, and he's not exactly great at seeing that far ahead.

Isn't that why Trump is in this mess? Failure to relate actions to consequences? Not like it was a surprise that a war would block trade.

 

[thunderous_funker]

He would start to care when the economy went into the toilet and gas was >$5 a gallon in red states.

Not unless it portends electoral losses or tarnishing the Legacy. This is, after all, the administration that responded to criticism of their trade policies with lecturing the public that access to "cheap stuff" was an entitlement they were determined to eliminate for the betterment of us all.

 

[redleader]

The Pentagon appears to have a three-phased plan to open the strait. The first stage involves hunting down Iranian military assets—speedboats, missiles, drones and mines—that threaten shipping in the strait. (Iran’s warships and submarines seem to have already been destroyed.) The hunters are mainly aircraft, but may soon include ground troops. The second phase is sweeping the strait for mines. Last, once Iran’s ability to prey on shipping has been sufficiently reduced, the US Navy would start escorting tankers through the strait. Each stage could take several weeks and would pose considerable risk to American forces.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/...o-reopen-the-strait-of-hormuz-would-look-like

 

[redleader]

Not unless it portends electoral losses or tarnishing the Legacy. This is, after all, the administration that responded to criticism of their trade policies with lecturing the public that access to "cheap stuff" was an entitlement they were determined to eliminate for the betterment of us all.

That isn't really true. Trump watches the stock market and seems to care a lot about how it reacts to him. He also might be willing to tank the republican party in the midterms, but I also kind of doubt it. Certainly the advisors he is listening to are not going to encourage him to do that.

 

[karolus]

That isn't really true. Trump watches the stock market and seems to care a lot about how it reacts to him. He also might be willing to tank the republican party in the midterms, but I also kind of doubt it. Certainly the advisors he is listening to are not going to encourage him to do that.

The unfortunate reality with his current crop of advisors is that they—like Trump himself—are primarily concerned with self-interest. So most decisions emanating from this group must be viewed from the stance of what's in it for them, first and foremost. An FYIGM taken into hyperdrive. If they can achieve their objectives and leave many of their supporters high-and-dry, they probably won't give that decision a second thought.

These people aren't concerned about stewardship or the common good. At all.