That's hard to believe. US with it's military spending should be able to join two large scale conflicts at the same time, not to have problem with a one minor conflict.
Venezuela thought the same thing. Keeping a full-scale deployment at arm's length, and 'only' targeting military targets with exhaustive use of precision missiles is poor strategy, but if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
Venezuela was likely a palace coup disguised as a purely foreign intervention by both parties involved. There is a reason why instead of holding an election or having the opposition take over, they just handed the country to Maduro's very own vice president.
>if a military victory were the US's only ambition the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
I read this and I wonder, "are we back to 2003 and Iraq?"
Incredible how little memory Americans have. Absolutely none. You just have no grasps on reality.
>the Iranian regime has no capability that could prevent its country from being turned into a smoldering parking lot.
This is a laughable amount of ignorance. The capability that Iran has to prevent this is physics
Iran is gigantic. Iran has 90 million people.
If you put together every long range precision munition the US has ever built, you could attack a single City and severely damage it.
People have zero sense of scale. To level cities the way we did in WW2 requires the level of industrial output that we had in WW2, because we have literally not made enough explosives to do so since
The US dropped 1.4 million tons of bombs on Germany alone in WW2
That's the equivalent of 3 million Tomahawk missiles. The US has built less than 10k total
The conflict with Iran is only 'minor' in certain respects, it's a major air campaign otherwise, involving strategic bombing on par with the Iraq War 2 - or at least the initial period.
The US is bombing them from very far away places, the amount of logistical overhead is unthinkable.
These munitions cost a fortune in part because they are purchased in lower quantities, and yes, they have to be able to do a 10x-50x instant ramp up in order to be effective (aka capacity not inventory which is the strategic key).
It takes 2 years minimum to adjust an economy in that way and the US does not have good supply chains.
It's unlikely the US could hope to fight any kind of prolonged conflict with China 'in the area of Chinese territory' for very obvious reasons: they have the supply chains, 1 billion workers, and can turn them on a dime, and don't have 'far to go' to deploy weapons.
The US doesn't even have reliable ways of getting goods and materials into the theatre and has limited quantities of everything.
That said, there are still ways to defend Taiwan and/or to make an invasion futile - but 'broad conflict' ... nope.
Then I’d stop at claiming “best” is meaningless in a military context without defining what the mission is. If it is starting wars, I’d say it’s great. If it means achieving goals, then it’s kind of meh.
US also has a large strategic-sealift force: dozens of RO/RO ships, commercial shipping agreements and prepositioned Army equipment in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
It can move man and materiel anywhere it pleases and fast.
Missiles (BIG EXPLOSION) look better when presented in video briefings to Trump and as propaganda on Fox news. It's all optics and style. No other goals.
America could theretically sustain other cheaper losses, like a few more F15s going down - but Trump is rightfully terrified of the political fallout of American pilots being capturred and torture videos showing up on Telegram.
Im no military planner so Im not gonna get invested in this debate haha - and obviously a human death is a huge loss - but presumably you could drop a lot of bombs for each lost fighter, so the bang/buck (literally) would be better than with missiles.
Planes aircrew high fixed/operating cost - lower unit costs on strikes.
Missiles, more expensive - depending on.
Missiles are not 'rocket science' - pun intended. They're expensive because of the overhead of military industrial complex.
Russia is making ballistic missiles 'China style' - super fast, super cheap. Basically - much bigger than ATACMs, longer range, a bit less precise but vicious. Similar to Iran.
"Minor" conflict? You really don't realize how much ressources Hesgeth has committed to this, and how much your president likes to make things go "boom".
See also: the number of strikes on boats in the Caribbean (with absolutely no result on drug trafficking).
