The amazing part to me is just the perceived invincibility this small circle within the US administration has. You can find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
In the fantasy imagination of some people, they really think you can take out some military targets of another country and then the oppressed masses will magically revolt, as they completely ignore the failed revolution just a month prior. Surround yourself with enough of these people while excluding and firing those who don't and this is what you get.
It's not just this administration. Everything with the US military has been going clearly downhill since the Millennium Challenge 2002. [1] It was, appropriately enough, a wargame simulating an invasion of Iran. It was a major event involving preparation in years and thousands of individual operators. When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
In modern times we increasingly seem to have entered into an era where people are willing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what they know to be true. And while it's easy to mock politicians and the military for this, this is also a mainstay of contemporary political discourse among regular people, including those who fancy themselves as well educated, on a variety of controversial issues.
I don't know what started this trend, but it should die. At least in terms of war it's self correcting. The US can't handle many more botched invasions or interventions, and I suspect we're already beyond the point of no return in terms of consequences of these errors.
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.
This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.
Nothing he did was really 'glitching' the game. Yes there were unexpected circumstances, but that's exactly what happens in war as well. As the old saying goes - no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The weapons defenses were turned off because they were having difficulty distinguishing between civilian and hostile targets, which is a completely viable scenario in an asymmetric conflict.
The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.
And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.
Some of what you're saying is fair. The simulation did have known issues, including glitches with point-defense systems and ships being placed unrealistically close to Red assets due to peacetime constraints on the exercise. The Wikipedia article on MC2002 acknowledges these shortfalls directly.
But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.
More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."
Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.
Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.
MC2002 was not primarily a wargame to develop operational plans. You can do that much easier and cheaper with a bunch of generals around a map. MC2002 was a training exercise with an element of competitiveness to pressure people under unexpected situations. As a training exercise its prime goal was not to figure out what plans were best but to just exercise plans and get people to do the plan, period. Given that, events that stopped the training exercise, like missileing all the ships, were retcon'd in order to do what the exercise was supposed to do, train people
Wargames have repeatedly been used to align strategic initiatives because they are designed to as closely replicate an adversary's actions and resources as closely as possible. So for instance in better times there was Proud Prophet [1], another wargame, played out in 1983. Its goal was to simulate outcomes of various scenarios involving hot conflict with the USSR. Up to the point of that wargame, the US position towards the USSR had been this sort of 'peace through strength', 'escalate to deescalate' nonsense.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
The Millennium Challenge 2002 is discredited because it had motorcycle couriers that moved at light speed handling all communications and 10' speed boats launching 19' missiles.
The game being reset makes sense - time and resources have been spent to make it happen, and it's best to get as much value from those resources as possible.
Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.
Except the US military DID learn from that war game. In the war game the US's fleet was utterly destroyed. In our real life, so far, the US navy has lost exactly zero ship against Iran.
It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.
This is an odd place to put a stake in the ground--there are a number of macro trends that have been going on for far longer (e.g. the military-industrial complex, the Cold War, Congress, American football), as well as a few others that have only really come to a head more recently (e.g. demographics, media spheres/tribalization). I would argue that our failure to learn lessons from the Millennium Challenge has a massive overlap with our failure to learn from Ukraine--not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam... The military is not monolithic--remember that the Millennium Challenge was more or less a sparring bout between two parts of the military with different philosophies--and it really takes something like an existential war for meritocracy and common sense to reassert themselves to a meaningful degree.
A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).
Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?
I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.
Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?
The US has turned into a Wall-e society just getting off on entertainment and bored with civilized, thoughtful politicians. This is the end result of TOO MUCH prosperity for the average American.
They haven't experienced true hardship in generations and we (the rest of the world) is paying the price of their hubris.
an find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.
To be fair, one can find plenty of analysis positing everything for the Middle East. The pointed criticisim is, in Devereux's words: "Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s."
I see a lot of people throw this "no revolution" perspective around when everyone involved has been very clear to the Iranian people: that this is the time to stay safe and inside. People rising up will take time, and will be highly unpredictable. No one said otherwise. You imply "analysts already had this all identified" yet you are putting forward a supposition here that's just wildly unrealistic.
There are too many people, enriched by the status quo, who won't move until their personal discomfort erodes, even while they're watching it get closer and closer (in denial). People who are going to be jobless in 6 months carrying water for the admin because they're afraid of losing their jobs now. This isn't a hypothetical, because it has been happening continuously for the past year-and-a-half. Yours truly is not exempt, but it's certainly frustrating watching people hem and haw from the other side of the line.
I get that people like me have no pull because we're already designated losers, but it would be nice if y'all would just take our word for it.
(1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US; hence Venezuela and Iran ahead of 2028. These are shaping operations. China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.
(2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so. If Iran can cheaply cut off passage, so can Saudi Arabia and UAE and everyone else there. They all have a long term mutual need in keeping this strait open.
All these recent analysis of conflicts in isolation, which always assume a lot of self-interest in disliked politicians, seem to make the analysts and authors blind to a much more probable and sensible grand strategy. Russia invading Ukraine and failing, has been the greatest strategic gift Russia could give to the US against China in setting the stage for shaping a defence of, and deterring an offensive on, Taiwan. Russia lost the ability to defend its proxies at a cost asymetrically small to the US. Hamas broke rank and allowed Israel to eventually decapitate Iran's proxies and air-defense step by step instead of all at once, setting the stage for the opportunity of the current war. And Russia being distracted also gave the US carte-blanche in Venezuela, not only via distraction but by proving that Russian air-defense isn't the thread it was thought to be.
The remaining strategic tension, in my humble opinion, is whether the US depletes its stockpiles too much without a caught up manufacturing capability, so that a Taiwan conflict becomes easy to win by default for China (via a blockade which would essentially be a cold war with few deaths and minimal damage) or if the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.
The situation, in my eyes, is evolving in a state where only two modes become dominant and both are slightly better for Taiwan.
> More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population.
Worth noting that at the time of invasion of Iraq they had about 25 million people per gemeni. They now have about 46 mil people per wikipedia. All else equal, we are comparing 25 mil to 93 mil and not half of 93 mil to 93 mil.
The Straight of Hormuz is open to any country willing to pay $2M per voyage. Any country except the U.S. and Israel.
The most important aspect of the "toll" is that Iran prefers payment in yuan, not dollars.
If Iran succeeds in nationalizing the Straight and is successful in enforcing the toll, it represents a very serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency for trading energy.
>Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not.
This is too complacent for my liking. Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones (operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia). Nearly every US oil refinery and LNG terminal are on the coast. And then there are floating oil platforms (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_(oil_platform))
The article then says:
>One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something.
And:
>And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can.
He writes that the region is not very important to the USA. It's not, but it is a strategically important area, not only in terms of its location, at the nexus of Asia, Africa and Europe, but also because of the oil there.
Now the US is not dependent on Middle Eastern Oil, but Japan, China and other countries are. So controlling the region will mean a lever of power over those regions.
A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end:
This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.
Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.
No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.
Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.
Netanyahu has a deadline. He is facing a snap election. If the Knesset doesn't pass a budget by March 31st, Israel votes 90 days later, and Netanyahu is not expected to win. Worse for Netanyahu, he's on trial for corruption charges, and
once he's out of office, he's probably headed for jail.
The war was intended to give Netanyahu's popularity a boost, but that did not work out.
> And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice.
On the other hand isn't this how the russian revolution happened? An economic crisis due to a prolonged war leading to a revolution? While i wouldn't bet money on it, it seems at least possible that something similar could happen to Iran.
Neither is the Middle East [an area of vital security interest to the United States]
> So long as [the Suez Canal and the Gulf] remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States.
I feel his assumption there can't be correct. Just look at the amount of military bases the US has built in the region, or the sheer number of wars there that the US was involved in. I can't imagine that a country would spend that kind of resources, money and lives for an area it deems not of vital strategic importance.
> Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others.
I assume/hope this was meant to say "the people in these countries are not [un]important"? (or just "are important")
As an entirely secular person, I believe every innocent human life is important.
Joe Kent [1] offered a possible way out of this - however slim the odds might be. Trump's one quality that may save us all from this quagmire is his ability to do a complete 180 on his previous committed path - "TACO" as his detractors like to call it. Like he did with ICE in Minneapolis, or in Yemen last year when he quit his bombing campaign after one month. If he could be convinced to just declare victory over Iran and move onto the next crisis of his creation - maybe send ICE to Cuba or invade Puerto Rico. He has the personal power to pull it off and his base will probably back him. Getting the Iranians to de-escalate and back to negotiations will be a challenge (after the second time he bombed them in middle of negotiations). The real problem will be restraining the Israelis who will likely do everything in their power to scuttle any deal and will do things to further drag the US and other countries in the region and the world into their war.
Another problem will be getting to through to Trump who seems to be cocooned in a reality distortion field cast by Fox News, the Israel Lobby and Israel-firsters in his administration. If enough people in his base and dissenters in his administration and the government can speak up and get through to him he might be convinced to change course.
The Democratic Party for their part seem to be quite unanimated in all this. It looks like they're playing a cynical double-game, hoping Trump gets further caught up in a web of his own making. I wonder if it will weigh on them at all if another school gets blown up or another thousand people die while they slow-walk the vote on the next war powers resolution.
Something the author didn't mention: what about building more pipelines to bypass the strait? If this war really cost 2B$ per day, why not allocate some of that money to finance pipelines across the gulf states? Might be worth it long term, especially if Iran plans to permanently impose a toll.
"...it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result."
1. The straight of Hormuz is crazy because of the sheer amount of options Iran has to threaten shipping. It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire. No need for missiles or drones at all! Lobbing kinetic shells may sound primitive, but anti-missile defences are designed to deal with large projectiles with minutes or hours of warning, not shell-sized projectiles that hit within seconds. If a U.S. war-ship enters the straight, they could be struck by fire from artillery that's been concealed for decades before they know they're under fire. It's also worth noting that Shahad drones have a larger range than the size of Iran, and they're hidden all over the country. Any ship transiting Hormuz or any ground force trying to land in Iran could face drone attack from anywhere in Iran, or all of it simultaneously. A few drones are easy to intercept, but give Iran a juicy enough target and they could make the decision to simply overwhelm it. Drones are a heavily parallel capability.
2. There are only a couple of lanes deep enough for large ships in the straight. So far, no ships have been sunk outright, and that's probably a deliberate choice on Iran's part. If they sink a ship at the right spot, the straight could become barricaded. Clearing that barricade under threat of fire would be a far worse pickle than what we're seeing now.
3. The critical question to ask is, "How does the U.S. end this?" Just continuing to bomb Iran is phenomenally expensive and likely won't accomplish much. This is a regime that has been preparing for an American invasion since they overthrew the CIA-installed Shah 47 years ago. They probably never seriously expected to win an air-war against the U.S. and have obviously planned for an asymmetric conflict. The U.S. is not going to win this one without phenomenal amounts of blood, treasure, and will, but all of these are in short supply. A ground invasion of Iran would likely be worse than Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam rolled into one. The U.S. can't win this war because they simply can't pay the price. Unfortunately, the straight of Hormuz gives Iran the ability to prevent Trump from simply TACO'ing out and proceeding to invade Cuba. Iran could keep the straight closed even after the U.S. withdraws their forces, and likely will to make sure everybody knows they can control the world economy at will. They're going to expect a peace settlement, and it won't be cheap.
4. This conflict lights a fire under the behinds of all nascent nuclear states. Iran would not have been invaded if they'd managed to build nuclear weapons. Even Iran is more likely to develop nuclear weapons now. Contrary to what some think, Iran isn't going to give up their enriched uranium and end their program just because the U.S. promises not to attack them again. Something like the JCPOA only works if some level of trust is possible, but Trump personally burned that. The best the U.S. is likely to get in negotiations is a superficial promise not to develop nuclear weapons, backed up by absolutely nothing. If the U.S. decides to end the program by force, the result will also be uncertain. Say the U.S. locates and extracts Iran's HEU from those underground facilities. How will they ever be certain they got it all without occupying the whole country?
- It's much more expensive to shoot down a Shahed drone than to build one.
- Iran could decide to attack water filtration plants in the Gulf countries.
- It's almost impossible to win a ground invasion without spending a ton of money because of the mountains.
Basically, even if the US wins this war, the entire world economy will suffer tremendously.
> They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
They (rich and well connected) did, but they won't have to suffer the consequences, everyone else will. The Pedo of the United States is now a billionaire that will walk away in 4 years shrugging his shoulders laughing all the way to the bank with them.
Not one person that could stop it, did stop it. Legislature is sitting on their thumbs pretending not to work for Israel and selling us out to big tech and defense spending.
All the Baby Boomers are in the south enjoying the sunshine and shrugging their shoulders.
I think the correct way of viewing this war is around internal White House power games.
I don't think Trump himself particularly cares about Iran (or indeed Israel) - as in I don't think he has strong heartfelt views or moral convictions that cause him to act one way or the other in the strategic sense.
But there are those in the White House who do.
My impression from afar is that JD Vance wouldn't have been very supportive of this war, but his faction lost some power after the success of the Venezuelan adventure.
I think that particular move was Marco Rubio, but I'm not sure he would have been crazy enough to make the jump from that working to thinking that war with Iran was a good idea.
It doesn't seem to have been Stephen Millar's idea either.
So maybe it was a bunch or fairly random people from the pro-Netanyahu faction in the WHite House (not sure of names? Maybe Hegseth?) who really believed that this would be a quick bombing attack to take out the Supreme Leader and degrade some Iranian military capabilities, and it would be quickly over?
Maybe it was just Pete Hegseth trying to seem extra macho and people actually listened?
Writing it down makes it clear how very confusing this it. Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
No one seems to discuss the worst case scenario for this war. In the best/average case the world takes an economic hit. But I can think of one really big black swan event which no one seems to even consider (except Nassim Taleb). This war could trigger regime collapses all over the Arab world and put populist leaders in charge who rise to power on the basis of Gaza genocide fury. That would be catastrophic to Israel: they could face Iran from the air and Arab ground forces from multiple directions. In fact there are already signs that Egypt is moving towards that, troops are moving in to the Sinai. There is a real chance that Israel could cease to exist.
The only counterpoint to the article's central thesis I really have is that frankly I don't think there even was a "Strategy" for this war beyond the fact it will distract the American populace from the Epstein files and somehow enrich Trump and his political cronies.
That's it. That's the whole damn "Causus belli" for this so called "Special military operation." It isn't intended to accomplish any specific geo-strategic goals, it doesn't have a plan or purpose, it's just a convenient distraction and way for some already very rich folks to get even richer.
This is honestly my major issue with the whole "Geo-strategic analysis industrial blogger / YouTuber complex" in that I think they far too often ascribe deeper meaning and geo-strategic planning or purpose to state actions when they can far more easily be interpreted through the lens of the political capture of nations and institutions by the wealthy elites, their greed / self interest and their monological desire to preserve the status quo and thus their own political / economic power.
Nations very seldom do pretty much anything these days because it would be of benefit to their nation or people, they almost exclusively only do things that benefit the wealthy elites who control them.
This war, like all wars throughout human history, is a class war, in that the lives and livings of us regular folks are being sacrificed at the alters of power and profit, all so certain rich folks can get even richer and keep their boot on our necks.
That this was so predictable, is the hardest thing to process. A friend shared this video by Jiang Xueqin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y_hbz6loEo&t=2s
I find this guys hard to take seriously, his logic is erratic and often just absent. But his prediction has been frighteningly spot on regarding Iran. Towards the end he predicts American boots on the ground - and them turning into American hostages. I found that last part truly unbelievable until I heard Trump will have moved 3000 marines to the region by Friday.
I agree with most of the sentiment in the OP with a few key disagreements. OP repeatedly says Iran is not very important (not strategically important). This is clearly not true for a few reasons:
1) They control the flow of oil, as we're seeing now.
2) They provide a huge amount of funding to hostile forces throughout the middle east - Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, pro-Iran militias in Iraq. This destabilizes the entire region, including important partners beyond Israel (Saudi Arabia, UAE). Their support for the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah, who killed nearly half a million Syrians during the civil war there, also created a huge refugee crisis throughout Europe that has led to a rise in far-right parties who are reacting to the failed integration of these refugees.
3) They provide drones to Russia and instructions for how to build those drones.
4) They provide oil to Russia and China, two major geopolitical adversaries.
5) They are among the most significant propagandists that use social media to destabilize the west - having been caught repeatedly manipulating social media platforms like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter/X.
There are also some strategic benefits to the current war, especially if you're a narcissistic kleptocrat running the US:
1) We've already seen the market manipulation.
2) Every bomb dropped is a bomb taxpayers must replace; that money goes right to defense contractors
3) Then consider the American oil companies: they stand to make a lot more money from this, as their products are now more scarce and more valuable. The US, as a net exporter of oil (we import low quality oil because we're good at refining it; we export the good stuff), will make more money.
4) The disruption of the Persian Gulf hurts Russia and China far more than it hurts the US and EU. There are some US allies and neutrals who get hurt (those in east Asia, gulf oil states). But it's not a balanced impact - we definitely come out on top in the current situation in my view.
5) Electric vehicles are starting to look a lot better. Who's Trump's bff and biggest financial backer, again? Does he operate in that space?
I think the overall impact of the attacks on Venezuela and Iran sum to an attack on the hostile Russia-Iran-China axis, with the benefit of hurting some of their minor allies as well. It seems too perfect that we attack the two largest non-allied oil suppliers in quick succession for it to be coincidence. It might not be Trump's plan, but it seems like a long-standing plan to achieve a favorable geopolitical environment.
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In the fantasy imagination of some people, they really think you can take out some military targets of another country and then the oppressed masses will magically revolt, as they completely ignore the failed revolution just a month prior. Surround yourself with enough of these people while excluding and firing those who don't and this is what you get.
Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
In modern times we increasingly seem to have entered into an era where people are willing to believe what they want to believe, rather than what they know to be true. And while it's easy to mock politicians and the military for this, this is also a mainstay of contemporary political discourse among regular people, including those who fancy themselves as well educated, on a variety of controversial issues.
I don't know what started this trend, but it should die. At least in terms of war it's self correcting. The US can't handle many more botched invasions or interventions, and I suspect we're already beyond the point of no return in terms of consequences of these errors.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
> Normally this would have been the end of it, lessons would be learned, and strategic directions adjusted. Instead the game was reset and the Iranian side was handicapped to prevent them from doing various things, effectively imposing a scripted result. This led to the US winning by an overwhelming margin and somehow the results of this rigged game were used to align strategic initiatives moving forward.
Wargames aren't like laser tag matches where one side wins and then it's over, the point of them is to be a training exercise. It's supposed to be closer to D&D than anything, where the person playing the opposing forces plays a similar role to the DM. If you look at interviews from other MC2002 participants, essentially what happened was that the Navy wanted to practice for an amphibious landing. Due to how they moved their ships, the computer running the simulation thought that the entire naval fleet had been instantly teleported right next to a massive armada of small boats that Van Riper had set up, without simulating what would have happened if the naval fleet had seen the enemy ships in the distance. Additionally, in real life Van Riper's fleet could not have held the missiles that he had told the computer they were carrying and now firing at point blank range at the Navy. The simulator that ran the US naval ships' defenses was also not functioning due to the engagement happening in an unexpected area, so it was turned off. Van Riper was able to sink the ships and defeat the navy within the bounds of the simulation, but not in a way that could have happened in real life.
This is basically like if I found an obscure sequence of chess moves that caused the Lichess server to crash and declare me the winner, then used it to beat a bunch of grandmasters, then went on a media tour saying that this proves that there's some massive flaw with how chess strategy is being taught.
The only big surprise was a rapidly closed engagement zone but even that absolutely could happen in real life, even if through different means. Ukraine's early success with suicide boats was precisely because they were unexpected, undetected, and able to get into range rapidly. If they had simultaneously deployed them at a much larger scale, the results would have essentially been a repeat of MC2002.
And more general, the discovery the 'Iranian' general in MC2002 made, some 24 years ago now, is that the future of warfare wasn't going to be giant behemoth vessels, but lots of really cheap asymmetric systems - another thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated beyond any doubt. Had this lesson been learned it's entirely possible that the US could have ended up on the forefront of advances in war instead of finding itself in a scenario where the bleeding edge of a trillion dollar military budget is literally just cloning Iranian drone tech.
But you're presenting very specific technical claims (that the boats couldn't physically carry the missiles, that the fleet was "teleported" next to the armada, that the defense simulator was "turned off") as though they're established fact. None of that appears in any sourced material I can find. If you have sources for those claims beyond "interviews from other MC2002 participants," I'd genuinely like to see them.
More importantly, you're glossing over the part that actually matters: what happened after the restart. Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be destroyed. They were forbidden from shooting down approaching aircraft during an airborne assault. They were told to reveal the location of their own units. The JFCOM's own postmortem report stated that "the OPFOR free-play was eventually constrained to the point where the end state was scripted."
Even if you accept that the initial result was partly an artifact of simulation quirks, the response wasn't "let's fix the sim and rerun it fairly." It was "let's force a Blue victory and use that to validate the concepts we were supposed to be testing." Van Riper's complaint wasn't just that he won and they took it away. It was that a $250 million exercise was turned into a rubber stamp.
Your chess analogy would be more accurate if, after your opponent crashed the server, the tournament organizers restarted the game but told you which pieces you were allowed to move, then published the result as proof their strategy was sound.
The problem is that the wargame demonstrated that it ended up with the extinction of the Northern Hemisphere every single time. We didn't then change the rules of the game to make it so we could still play nuclear games and come out okay, but instead took this as a major wakeup call. It directly led to a shift in US policy towards the USSR of coexistence, de-escalation, and some degree of reconciliation. Within 7 years the first McDonalds would open in the USSR, and the entire Soviet system would collapse in under a decade after the shift of the strategy driven entirely by this wargame result.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
Of course this means learning the lesson of how the first defeat happened. You reset so that you can learn more lessons. If they ignored the lesson of the first defeat, that's stupid. But the reset itself makes sense.
who rigs the results of a war game and believes the results - only an idiot drunk on power.
It's very interesting that you can look at the situation and say the war game where Iran destroyed the US navy is "not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion" though. I guess in the end different people perceive the reality differently.
A smaller point: all military exercises are heavily scripted--it's more or less impossible for them to be otherwise, as you just can't simulate the details of war that matter without actually killing people, breaking things, and giving up your secret game plans. Usually the goal of this sort of thing is to make sure that everything (people, equipment, doctrine) works together more or less as intended, and people have the experience leading and operating in larger units than they do on a routine basis. The PR people then spin it into an unqualified and historic success, validation of our technology and tactics against the forces of evil, blah blah blah. It is still very difficult to draw the right lessons from these sorts of things--even more so when the civilian leadership of the military has 99 things to consider besides a certain kind of pure military effectiveness (and although I have strong feelings here, we're still doing quite well on the tactical and operational levels in spite of everything).
Fun fact: the Millennium Challenge is still taught as a case study in basic officer training, at least in the Marine Corps (well, probably--it definitely was a little over a decade ago).
> When it was carried out the invading force was defeated by unexpected resources and resourcefulness from the Iranian side, not entirely unlike what Iran has done during our invasion.
Are you saying that Iran is capably fighting and killing US personnel, aircraft, and invading infantry?
I am a little confused about the universe you live in. The IRGC and Basij effectively do not have a chain of command and are effectively moving and acting by momentum, essentially no different than a dead man walking.
Do you know the names of any alive people in the IRGC chain of command? Have you seen videos or evidence of IRGC doing anything to harm US forces other than lob some stuff and hope it hits? Where are the Islamic Iranian armies and navies you imply to exist?
The US has turned into a Wall-e society just getting off on entertainment and bored with civilized, thoughtful politicians. This is the end result of TOO MUCH prosperity for the average American.
They haven't experienced true hardship in generations and we (the rest of the world) is paying the price of their hubris.
>
an find dozens of articles with a search limited to Feb 1~Feb 27, plenty of analysis warning of the risks that have now become reality, everything - the strait, no revolution, further radicalization, critically low US stockpiles, abandoning other US partners, gulf destabilization, etc.To be fair, one can find plenty of analysis positing everything for the Middle East. The pointed criticisim is, in Devereux's words: "Iran would thus need a ‘lever’ closer to home which could inflict costs on the United States. For – and I must stress this – for forty years everyone has known this was the strait. This is not a new discovery, we did this before in the 1980s."
I get that people like me have no pull because we're already designated losers, but it would be nice if y'all would just take our word for it.
(1) reducing oil shipments to China is good posturing for the US; hence Venezuela and Iran ahead of 2028. These are shaping operations. China suffers more from these conflicts than the US.
(2) Iran isn't the only one who can control passage throught the strait. All gulf countries can do so. If Iran can cheaply cut off passage, so can Saudi Arabia and UAE and everyone else there. They all have a long term mutual need in keeping this strait open.
All these recent analysis of conflicts in isolation, which always assume a lot of self-interest in disliked politicians, seem to make the analysts and authors blind to a much more probable and sensible grand strategy. Russia invading Ukraine and failing, has been the greatest strategic gift Russia could give to the US against China in setting the stage for shaping a defence of, and deterring an offensive on, Taiwan. Russia lost the ability to defend its proxies at a cost asymetrically small to the US. Hamas broke rank and allowed Israel to eventually decapitate Iran's proxies and air-defense step by step instead of all at once, setting the stage for the opportunity of the current war. And Russia being distracted also gave the US carte-blanche in Venezuela, not only via distraction but by proving that Russian air-defense isn't the thread it was thought to be.
The remaining strategic tension, in my humble opinion, is whether the US depletes its stockpiles too much without a caught up manufacturing capability, so that a Taiwan conflict becomes easy to win by default for China (via a blockade which would essentially be a cold war with few deaths and minimal damage) or if the weakened China (due to oil constraints) would be simply unable to attack in 2028, the strategic window when it can do so.
The situation, in my eyes, is evolving in a state where only two modes become dominant and both are slightly better for Taiwan.
> More relevantly for us, Iran is 3.5 times larger than Iraq and roughly twice the population.
Worth noting that at the time of invasion of Iraq they had about 25 million people per gemeni. They now have about 46 mil people per wikipedia. All else equal, we are comparing 25 mil to 93 mil and not half of 93 mil to 93 mil.
The most important aspect of the "toll" is that Iran prefers payment in yuan, not dollars.
If Iran succeeds in nationalizing the Straight and is successful in enforcing the toll, it represents a very serious threat to the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world's reserve currency for trading energy.
>Iran would have to respond and thus would have to try to find a way to inflict ‘pain’ on the United States to force the United States to back off. But whereas Israel is in reach of some Iranian weapons, the United States is not.
This is too complacent for my liking. Every rusty trawler is a viable launch platform for Shahed type drones (operational range ~2500 km per Wikipedia). Nearly every US oil refinery and LNG terminal are on the coast. And then there are floating oil platforms (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdido_(oil_platform))
The article then says:
>One can never know how well prepared an enemy is for something.
And:
>And if I can reason this out, Iran – which has been planning for this exact thing for forty years certainly can.
I'll leave it here for y'all to ponder.
Now the US is not dependent on Middle Eastern Oil, but Japan, China and other countries are. So controlling the region will mean a lever of power over those regions.
When dealing with the Middle East we keep underestimating the amount of hardship the people I these countries can endure or be forced to endure.
This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.
Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.
No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.
Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.
Netanyahu has a deadline. He is facing a snap election. If the Knesset doesn't pass a budget by March 31st, Israel votes 90 days later, and Netanyahu is not expected to win. Worse for Netanyahu, he's on trial for corruption charges, and once he's out of office, he's probably headed for jail.
The war was intended to give Netanyahu's popularity a boost, but that did not work out.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-seeks-av...
> And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice.
On the other hand isn't this how the russian revolution happened? An economic crisis due to a prolonged war leading to a revolution? While i wouldn't bet money on it, it seems at least possible that something similar could happen to Iran.
My takeaway from the war in Ukraine is: it’s going to get worse and last longer than anyone ever imagined.
>
Neither is the Middle East [an area of vital security interest to the United States]> So long as [the Suez Canal and the Gulf] remained open the region does not matter very much to the United States.
I feel his assumption there can't be correct. Just look at the amount of military bases the US has built in the region, or the sheer number of wars there that the US was involved in. I can't imagine that a country would spend that kind of resources, money and lives for an area it deems not of vital strategic importance.
> Please understand me: the people in these countries are not important, but as a matter of national strategy, some places are more important than others.
I assume/hope this was meant to say "the people in these countries are not [un]important"? (or just "are important")
As an entirely secular person, I believe every innocent human life is important.
Another problem will be getting to through to Trump who seems to be cocooned in a reality distortion field cast by Fox News, the Israel Lobby and Israel-firsters in his administration. If enough people in his base and dissenters in his administration and the government can speak up and get through to him he might be convinced to change course.
The Democratic Party for their part seem to be quite unanimated in all this. It looks like they're playing a cynical double-game, hoping Trump gets further caught up in a web of his own making. I wonder if it will weigh on them at all if another school gets blown up or another thousand people die while they slow-walk the vote on the next war powers resolution.
[1] - Interesting interview between Kent and Saagar Enjeti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XMyC2Cr7X0
This war doesn't make any sense for US to be involved in. It makes every sense for Israel to have the US involved in.
1. The straight of Hormuz is crazy because of the sheer amount of options Iran has to threaten shipping. It's so narrow that they can even hit ships with artillery fire. No need for missiles or drones at all! Lobbing kinetic shells may sound primitive, but anti-missile defences are designed to deal with large projectiles with minutes or hours of warning, not shell-sized projectiles that hit within seconds. If a U.S. war-ship enters the straight, they could be struck by fire from artillery that's been concealed for decades before they know they're under fire. It's also worth noting that Shahad drones have a larger range than the size of Iran, and they're hidden all over the country. Any ship transiting Hormuz or any ground force trying to land in Iran could face drone attack from anywhere in Iran, or all of it simultaneously. A few drones are easy to intercept, but give Iran a juicy enough target and they could make the decision to simply overwhelm it. Drones are a heavily parallel capability.
2. There are only a couple of lanes deep enough for large ships in the straight. So far, no ships have been sunk outright, and that's probably a deliberate choice on Iran's part. If they sink a ship at the right spot, the straight could become barricaded. Clearing that barricade under threat of fire would be a far worse pickle than what we're seeing now.
3. The critical question to ask is, "How does the U.S. end this?" Just continuing to bomb Iran is phenomenally expensive and likely won't accomplish much. This is a regime that has been preparing for an American invasion since they overthrew the CIA-installed Shah 47 years ago. They probably never seriously expected to win an air-war against the U.S. and have obviously planned for an asymmetric conflict. The U.S. is not going to win this one without phenomenal amounts of blood, treasure, and will, but all of these are in short supply. A ground invasion of Iran would likely be worse than Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam rolled into one. The U.S. can't win this war because they simply can't pay the price. Unfortunately, the straight of Hormuz gives Iran the ability to prevent Trump from simply TACO'ing out and proceeding to invade Cuba. Iran could keep the straight closed even after the U.S. withdraws their forces, and likely will to make sure everybody knows they can control the world economy at will. They're going to expect a peace settlement, and it won't be cheap.
4. This conflict lights a fire under the behinds of all nascent nuclear states. Iran would not have been invaded if they'd managed to build nuclear weapons. Even Iran is more likely to develop nuclear weapons now. Contrary to what some think, Iran isn't going to give up their enriched uranium and end their program just because the U.S. promises not to attack them again. Something like the JCPOA only works if some level of trust is possible, but Trump personally burned that. The best the U.S. is likely to get in negotiations is a superficial promise not to develop nuclear weapons, backed up by absolutely nothing. If the U.S. decides to end the program by force, the result will also be uncertain. Say the U.S. locates and extracts Iran's HEU from those underground facilities. How will they ever be certain they got it all without occupying the whole country?
It talks about how:
- It's much more expensive to shoot down a Shahed drone than to build one. - Iran could decide to attack water filtration plants in the Gulf countries. - It's almost impossible to win a ground invasion without spending a ton of money because of the mountains.
Basically, even if the US wins this war, the entire world economy will suffer tremendously.
> They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences.
They (rich and well connected) did, but they won't have to suffer the consequences, everyone else will. The Pedo of the United States is now a billionaire that will walk away in 4 years shrugging his shoulders laughing all the way to the bank with them.
Not one person that could stop it, did stop it. Legislature is sitting on their thumbs pretending not to work for Israel and selling us out to big tech and defense spending.
All the Baby Boomers are in the south enjoying the sunshine and shrugging their shoulders.
I don't think Trump himself particularly cares about Iran (or indeed Israel) - as in I don't think he has strong heartfelt views or moral convictions that cause him to act one way or the other in the strategic sense.
But there are those in the White House who do.
My impression from afar is that JD Vance wouldn't have been very supportive of this war, but his faction lost some power after the success of the Venezuelan adventure.
I think that particular move was Marco Rubio, but I'm not sure he would have been crazy enough to make the jump from that working to thinking that war with Iran was a good idea.
It doesn't seem to have been Stephen Millar's idea either.
So maybe it was a bunch or fairly random people from the pro-Netanyahu faction in the WHite House (not sure of names? Maybe Hegseth?) who really believed that this would be a quick bombing attack to take out the Supreme Leader and degrade some Iranian military capabilities, and it would be quickly over?
Maybe it was just Pete Hegseth trying to seem extra macho and people actually listened?
Writing it down makes it clear how very confusing this it. Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
Why does this happen? It is because israel blackmails American politicians.
It would be better to show all the dirty shit to the public than for the world to die for israel.
They even have missiles targeting the USA in case "they feel over run"! They are an enemy to the world.
That's it. That's the whole damn "Causus belli" for this so called "Special military operation." It isn't intended to accomplish any specific geo-strategic goals, it doesn't have a plan or purpose, it's just a convenient distraction and way for some already very rich folks to get even richer.
This is honestly my major issue with the whole "Geo-strategic analysis industrial blogger / YouTuber complex" in that I think they far too often ascribe deeper meaning and geo-strategic planning or purpose to state actions when they can far more easily be interpreted through the lens of the political capture of nations and institutions by the wealthy elites, their greed / self interest and their monological desire to preserve the status quo and thus their own political / economic power.
Nations very seldom do pretty much anything these days because it would be of benefit to their nation or people, they almost exclusively only do things that benefit the wealthy elites who control them.
This war, like all wars throughout human history, is a class war, in that the lives and livings of us regular folks are being sacrificed at the alters of power and profit, all so certain rich folks can get even richer and keep their boot on our necks.
I'm not an American so I'm not sure if the voting base actually believed him.
1) They control the flow of oil, as we're seeing now.
2) They provide a huge amount of funding to hostile forces throughout the middle east - Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, pro-Iran militias in Iraq. This destabilizes the entire region, including important partners beyond Israel (Saudi Arabia, UAE). Their support for the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah, who killed nearly half a million Syrians during the civil war there, also created a huge refugee crisis throughout Europe that has led to a rise in far-right parties who are reacting to the failed integration of these refugees.
3) They provide drones to Russia and instructions for how to build those drones.
4) They provide oil to Russia and China, two major geopolitical adversaries.
5) They are among the most significant propagandists that use social media to destabilize the west - having been caught repeatedly manipulating social media platforms like Reddit, Instagram, Twitter/X.
There are also some strategic benefits to the current war, especially if you're a narcissistic kleptocrat running the US:
1) We've already seen the market manipulation.
2) Every bomb dropped is a bomb taxpayers must replace; that money goes right to defense contractors
3) Then consider the American oil companies: they stand to make a lot more money from this, as their products are now more scarce and more valuable. The US, as a net exporter of oil (we import low quality oil because we're good at refining it; we export the good stuff), will make more money.
4) The disruption of the Persian Gulf hurts Russia and China far more than it hurts the US and EU. There are some US allies and neutrals who get hurt (those in east Asia, gulf oil states). But it's not a balanced impact - we definitely come out on top in the current situation in my view.
5) Electric vehicles are starting to look a lot better. Who's Trump's bff and biggest financial backer, again? Does he operate in that space?
I think the overall impact of the attacks on Venezuela and Iran sum to an attack on the hostile Russia-Iran-China axis, with the benefit of hurting some of their minor allies as well. It seems too perfect that we attack the two largest non-allied oil suppliers in quick succession for it to be coincidence. It might not be Trump's plan, but it seems like a long-standing plan to achieve a favorable geopolitical environment.
>but more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis for the first time in American history.
Dangerous stuff there pal, AIPAC coming for ya now. /s
Other than that, this whole thing is very well written and thought out. I found myself bobbing my head in agreement repeatedly.
I also must point out this gem: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." – Very well said.