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(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and lat
by pendenthistory 2mo ago
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
- hgoel 2mo agoI think their point is that it doesn't really matter how competent the lower levels of the command structure are if the ones at the very top are bumbling fools unwilling to listen.
- LastTrain 2mo agoYou think the US has shown itself as to be extremely competent in the Iran war? If you were talking about Iraq, that was completely different leadership.
- jonnybgood 2mo agoThe US killed almost the entire Iranian regime leadership with minimal cost. What definition of competence are you going by?
- yifanl 2mo agoAnd then what happened?
- organsnyder 2mo agoI'd argue that seriously upending global energy markets (and perhaps the entire economy) is quite a high cost.
- jonnybgood 2mo agoPolitically, yes.
- DANmode 2mo agoNobody stateside is immune from the very real, very steep, very ongoing financial costs of this “conflict”.
- Lewton 2mo ago“With minimal cost” Are you trolling
- jonnybgood 2mo agoFrom a military standpoint, no.
- tw04 2mo agohttps://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-strikes-us-bases-middle-east-radar-destroyed-pentagon-damage-2026/ https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-strikes-us-bases-mid... From a military standpoint, yes. You have to have your head buried in the sand to think we didn’t have significant loss of military assets in the region.
- adventured 2mo agoHow many lives has the US lost? What has Iran lost so far in the conflict with the US and Israel (a conflict which is not over)? The propaganda attempting to spin this as setting up as a strategic defeat for the US, is almost comical. As is, the US can stand-off and torment Iran for a very, very long time. $31 trillion economy. $94,000 GDP per capita (nearly 3x Japan for reference). The US can spend $100 billion annually on bombing Iran for the next decade entirely without harming its economy in a meaningful way. The US doesn't have to let off. Iran is pinned, massively eroded, and the US is only losing money. Iran has lost all of its proxies, its military is entirely broken (and fully capable of waging a guerrilla conflict), its navy is gone, its airforce is gone, its military manufacturing is substantially eroded, and Russia is boiling. The reason the US is going back and forth on peace, is for the same exact same reason it's in the US interest to bleed Russia. It's this: let's pretend we want peace, while we endlessly grind Iran down.
- only-one1701 2mo agoDamn the USA seems really powerful, I’m assuming handling a country like Iran shouldn’t give them any trouble
- pendenthistory 2mo agoI mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
- Zigurd 2mo agoOne of these things is not like the other. Russia is a threat to Europe, and is in the midst of invading a country with a lot of agricultural, industrial, and cultural upside that should be on the road to EU integration. Bombing the snot out of Russian trenches in eastern Ukraine might even be a good idea. And the reasons for bombing Iran are...?
- pendenthistory 2mo ago
- buran77 2mo agoNot only leadership, war looked different back then. The Ukraine war made everyone throw away the classic war playbook. At the time of the Iraq war the US was holding all the cards. It had a perfected playbook, the optimal technology, and support from the population. In the Iran war the old playbook is ineffective, the technology is too expensive to keep it up, and the popular support for a war demanded by another country isn't there. And yes... you have the current crop of leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
- joemi 2mo ago> As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?
- overfeed 2mo agoI was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.
- californical 2mo agoHave they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about. Meanwhile Iran is in rough shape
- superb_dev 2mo agoGas prices are up a bit? In my area it’s gone up at least $2 from before the war. Which is just another way that everything has gotten so much more expensive recently (not that all of that is caused by the war).
- californical 2mo agoAgreed yes that’s not great. But really if that’s the worst thing you’re noticing in your daily life at home, things must be pretty ok? You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos. Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
- overfeed 2mo ago
- mikenew 2mo agoIt's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.
- rayiner 2mo agoBut running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one.
- Jtsummers 2mo ago> But running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one. It's absolutely a strategic failure to enter into a war without sufficient munitions or logistical capability to sustain the war.
- Someone 2mo agoIs executing a strategy that you (should) know to be impossible to implement because of logistical limitations really a logistics failure? It’s not as if the US, a few years ago, said it needed way more long-range precision weapons in 2026, and didn’t get them, despite promises to the contrary.
- apawloski 2mo agoUnless the counts were unclear it would actually be all three!
- timacles 2mo agoYou have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.
- kevin_thibedeau 2mo agoA bit disparaging of morons. It takes a special kind of imbecile to ignore decades of war planning that pointed out the vulnerability of the strait.
- only-one1701 2mo agoMaduro operation wasn’t a war my good man and the other two you reference were 20 and 30 years ago.
- wat10000 2mo agoMilitary competence has nothing to do with running low on munitions after months of war. There are four ways to address the issue: have larger stockpiles before the war, ramp up production during the war, end the war, or don't go to war in the first place. None of those can be done by the military. It's all up to the civilian leadership, and the current civilian leadership is catastrophically incompetent. The current commander in chief is a "fucking moron," to quote his former Secretary of State.
- nikanj 2mo agoExtremely competent military expert: "Sir, we should hold back up strikes to preserve the stockpile of valuable high-precision missiles" Someone higher up the chain of command: "Fire the missiles, or I'll replace you with someone who will"
- Jtsummers 2mo ago> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, which tells you nothing about the US's capabilities in actual warfare against a peer, near peer, or just damned determined opponents. > Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well. That was not a comparable action to the Maduro raid. The raid was an in-and-out operation, with no need to control any territory for a significant period. Hostomel was a battle over control of territory.
- heavenlyblue 2mo agoAs a note, while there was no war Russia has already acquired Crimea a few years before and it was only a matter of time before invasion itself was to happen, so Ukraine was preparing for that attack more or less.
- lbreakjai 2mo agoVenezuela was also a palace coup. They didn't raid, they came to collect.
- Jtsummers 2mo agoThat as well, what resistance was present was reduced from what it could have been (not everyone was in on it).
- georgemcbay 2mo ago(Am an American, don't know if it matters that I preface with this) The US military is quite powerful. Donald Trump is a moron. Pete Hegseth is also a moron whose only qualification is that he looks like what the moron Donald Trump imagines someone playing his role would look like in the movies/TV.
- abirch 2mo agoRegarding Iraq, please Google “Dick Cheney 1994” he predicted exactly what happened in 2003.
- greedo 2mo agoDesert Storm was 35 years ago. Almost everyone who fought in it is out of service or dead. Iraqi invasion was 23 years ago. Again, almost everyone who was part of the initial invasion is out of service. I wouldn't call the occupation of either Afghanistan or Iraq "extremely competent." More like the exact opposite.
- elendilm 2mo agoAhhh. The Maduro operation. You remember a soldier from Maduro's guard saying they were brought to their knees by a wonder weapon. Shame the wonder weapon didn't surface in Ukraine nor in Iran nor in Yemen where it was desperately needed. But we hear about the wonder weapon and how wonderful it was on TV. Must be really true :).