(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.
> 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.
Venezuela was also a palace coup. They didn't raid, they came to collect.
That as well, what resistance was present was reduced from what it could have been (not everyone was in on it).
As 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.
I 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.
If you don’t have an objective, no amount of military might is going to get you there. This was the USA’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
Since the objective was never disclosed, one might assume it was to deplete our magazine depth.
It'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.
But running out of missiles—which is the accusation being made above—would be a tactical and logistics failure, not a strategic one.
> 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.
Is 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.
You 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.
Unless the counts were unclear it would actually be all three!
A 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.
You 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.
Not 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.
The US killed almost the entire Iranian regime leadership with minimal cost. What definition of competence are you going by?
The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
None of that contradicts what I said. Obviously, the Iranian regime will replace them.
It does. The initial strike, while effective, has proven to achieve absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. Neither Iran's military nor logistic nor even administrative capability was impacted to any serious extent. The population, of which a large proportion was against the regime and potentially on the brink of a revolt, quickly fell in line and became supporters, faced with the external opposition. And Iran has proven its ability to unilaterally close the straight of Hormuz, a crippling blow to the entire world's economy that the USA is simply unable to stop.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.
The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:
1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)
2. Remove Iran’s theocratic anti-American regime (Not Achieved)
3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)
So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.
You don’t know the difference between tactics and strategy.
The US has been consistently tactically excellent. Strategically this is a blundering loss.
If you strategically aim your awesome unmatched powers the wrong way you can still lose.
Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.
Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.
I'd argue that seriously upending global energy markets (and perhaps the entire economy) is quite a high cost.
Politically, yes.
Nobody stateside is immune from the very real, very steep, very ongoing financial costs of this “conflict”.
“With minimal cost”
Are you trolling
From a military standpoint, no.
Yes, but the military exists for the nation, not the other way around, so a military success that turns into a national disaster is not a military success at all.
That's why even in the nuclear Navy, as crazy as they are about reactor safety, they would train and preach continuously that "safety of ship" is more important than reactor safety, because the reactor is not safe if the ship is not safe.
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.
And then what happened?
A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars. About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.
These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.
tactical win - they achieved that quite easily.
strategic failure - iran shrugged it off and now are causing massive damage to world economy with no end in sight.
Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
The US fully achieved its objective of distracting attention away from the Trump-Epstein files.
How 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.
Damn the USA seems really powerful, I’m assuming handling a country like Iran shouldn’t give them any trouble
I 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.
One 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...?
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Ahhh. 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 :).
Desert 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.
> 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?
I 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.
Iran has survived this war so far because the aggressor hasn't made any attempt to actually defeat them. It's very different from Ukraine, which is holding its own against an all-out invasion. Iran might well be able to withstand an all-out invasion by the US, but it hasn't had to yet.
Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission, something that in the entire history of aerial warfare has worked exactly once (and even that one time is debatable).
Have 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
> Gas prices are up a bit.
A gross understatement.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.
Gas 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).
Agreed 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.
> Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
With the exception of total wars, the domestic standard of living has very little to do with how well or not a foreign war is going.
How good Americans are living is a non-sequitur with regards to the war objectives set by the political and military leaders in Washington and Tehran. War, being politics by other means, has to be measured by political objectives. The average American didn't even notice when America relinquished control of Afghanistan to the Taliban, amd yet it was a clear-cut failure to achieve GW's stated goals.
Maduro operation wasn’t a war my good man and the other two you reference were 20 and 30 years ago.
Regarding Iraq, please Google “Dick Cheney 1994” he predicted exactly what happened in 2003.
Extremely 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"
Military 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.
(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.