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> Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are. Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes t

by drnick1 11d ago

> Iran has shown how utterly pointless and ineffective these expensive weapons are. Make no mistake, the US has exercised incredible restraint when it comes to Iran. If it wanted to, they would be nothing left of Iran at all.

cogman10 11d ago
Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters. To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan. Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.
- drnick1 11d ago
  [flagged]
- bit38ds 11d ago
  [flagged]
- toast0 11d ago
  > To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them. US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
  - cogman10 11d ago
    My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations. But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.
vablings 11d ago
I'm sorry but that's absolutely incorrect. The USA has literally zero control when it comes to Iran.
mrguyorama 11d ago
Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land. Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s. America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will. Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale. The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed. If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs. Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day. And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHave...
- shadowtree 11d ago
  Could ask Japan how that math changed - and that was with technology from 1944. A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
  - AngryData 10d ago
    Traditional bombing campaigns did far more damage to Japan than the nukes did though. Also any plan that relies on dropping multiple nukes as an aggressor is a losing plan as the entire world will turn against you.
AngryData 11d ago
So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world? Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations? Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.
dragochat 11d ago
actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm

by drnick1 11d ago

cogman10 11d ago

Right, so we definitely have the ability to commit genocide, but we lack the ability to dismantle the government without being monsters. To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan. Gaza shows this as well. Even with the genocide that Israel is actively committing, Hamas remains. You cannot bomb your way into a change of government.

drnick1 11d ago
[flagged]
bit38ds 11d ago
[flagged]
toast0 11d ago
> To actually do the hard thing that the trump admin wants, we need to send in boots on the ground. And even then, we've seen how totally ineffective that is with Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think the trump admin has communicated its war aims, so it's pretty hard to evaluate what sort of deployment would be most effective at achieving them. US/allied boots on the ground (as part of combined arms) are pretty effective at invasion. They're not so effective in counter insurgency / counter terrorism / asymmetric war. It's hard to win an asymmetric war with violence if you're the powerful party; the opposition tends to be highly committed and you'd need to capture or kill enough fighters to reduce their capacity to fight and avoid driving recruitment. Negotiations and diplomacy can bring these conflicts to a close, but that's not really the domain of the boots on the ground; certainly boots on the ground can help or hinder diplomacy, but finding an agreement on peace terms isn't their role.
- cogman10 11d ago
  My assumption is they thought they could kill the supreme leader and get Venezuela 2.0 where Iran's next leader ends up being a puppet to the US. I doubt they thought this war would be going on this long. They tested the waters with Iran in June 2025 and since Iran was still willing to negotiate even after that strike, I think the Trump admin assumed they could go a lot further and get even more favorable negotiations. But it's true this hasn't been clearly communicated. I think, mainly, because it really wasn't well thought out.

vablings 11d ago

I'm sorry but that's absolutely incorrect. The USA has literally zero control when it comes to Iran.

mrguyorama 11d ago

Iran is 90 million people and a gigantic mass of land. Go read some history about what industrial quantity of ordinance was required to somewhat destroy European cities in the 40s. America does not have a bomber fleet capable of doing that in Iran, no matter the will. Strategic Bombing in WW2 is an unfathomable scale. The US, just the US not Britain (who had similar numbers on their own), dropped 1.4 million tons of ordinance on German occupied Europe. That's the equivalent of 5.6 million MK82 based JDAM bombs. The immense weight of explosives managed to degrade German cities by about one half. It took thousands of bombers to do so, including 10,000 bombers being destroyed. If every single one of the 72 B52 bombers we still have were loaded to the gills with 140 MK82 JDAMs to fly over Tehran, we would lose many irreplaceable airframes, and would only manage to drop 2500 tons of bombs. Dresden, which only killed 25k people and reduced industrial output by like 15% temporarily was 3900 tons of ordinance on just that one day. And Dresden was a lightly hit target in the war. Berlin was hit with nearly a pound of bomb per human being living in it. Essen was hit with six times that TL;DR: The people who believe this have no sense of scale. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SciFiWritersHave...

shadowtree 11d ago
Could ask Japan how that math changed - and that was with technology from 1944. A single Trident can (officially) carry 4-5 warheads, up to 476 KT each.
- AngryData 10d ago
  Traditional bombing campaigns did far more damage to Japan than the nukes did though. Also any plan that relies on dropping multiple nukes as an aggressor is a losing plan as the entire world will turn against you.

AngryData 11d ago

So the US didn't blow 90% of its surface missiles on Iran and park an aircraft carrier and other ships off their shore for months? That they didn't assassinate multiple leaders? Or spike fuel costs across the entire world? Or are you saying they have used restraint by not committing genocide and undeniable crimes against humanity for nuking a bunch of civilian populations? Because if its the 2nd one, the only thing that would accomplish is turn the entire world against the US until there was nothing left of the US also.

dragochat 11d ago

actions that impact tens of millions of ppl can have consequences that are hard to predict - the ppl in power play power games, by definition, and most of them can't afford many of these consequence bc they'd be fatal to their games fortunately even the most "malicious" actors are at least reasonable, even when not fully rational also it's a GOOD thing there are billions of us on the planet still, this makes the powerful warmongerers still afraid to not push things too much into the chaotic realm