What in your view makes these ones proven and other ones not proven?

It’s not like you get to the end of the chain and trade a fistful of dollars with the ingot of aluminum itself.

That's what the US tried to do. The problem is that they were unable to degrade the Iranian missile systems enough that they could drop gravity bombs with impunity. This also means that they had to pull the aircraft that they would use to do bombing runs back to bases in Jordan and Israel because anything on the tarmac in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE is very vulnerable to Iranian drone and missile strikes. All of this means that they're forcing the US to choose between pulling out of the region or accepting losses of personnel and airframes (that likely cannot be replaced in a timely manner) at a level that the post-Vietnam US military has never had to face.

I suspect an all-out war between the US and China would go the same way as this one, if not worse. The US military in its modern form has focused on procuring very complex, advanced, and featureful weapons in tiny numbers. The problem is that this means that the US is incapable of fighting a sustained campaign against an adversary that can withstand attacks from American weapons and has a higher production capacity.

The best US strategy is to just arm Taiwan to the teeth by selling weapons to make the invasion as risky as possible. But China can (and this is their smart play, IMO) is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.

It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.

Never say never.

We have thus far been supremely lucky that irrational actors have not acquired a nuclear bomb. But the reality is that throughout history most leaders have been irrational.

My country (America) is behaving increasingly irrationally. I've been hearing fringe conservatives calling for nuking the middle east since the early 2000s, but the rot has spread and became deeply religious.

Now I hear talk of the end times from the most powerful people in the country, actively building bunkers. Groups of Republicans openly talking about the US being allowed to take whatever we want from anyone we want through war (Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, Canada).

Almost all of our leadership has been replaced in every branch of government. SCOTUS is clearly compromised and bought. The legislative may as well be dead. Almost all executive agencies have been purged, what remains have had their heads swapped with sycophants. Something like half of the military generals have been turned over. The DoD was renamed to the DoW with cheers, as an alcoholic prison guard was put in charge and has started touting hypermacho religious warrior catchphrases and openly advocating for war crimes.

The other day we testimony from judges before legislature who refused to say if Presidents can run for three terms or that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Under oath, just simply refused.

And that's before getting into how the President of the United States started a war to distract from his involvement in the highest profile sex trafficking ring in human history, and has continued to use his position to perform insider trading on oil prices repeatedly for weeks.

If you said any of this would be happening in 2005, I would have laughed at how "that would never happen in the US". And now it's just... reality. Like Russia. And it seems to have no end in sight. So what actually happens if Trump gets so deranged he hits the red button? And if not him, who will the loonies pick tomorrow - someone who actually believes in "the cause", who doesn't understand it's a grift?

And what are the external long term consequences of Trump's actions in countries like Iran and Venezuela and Ukraine? The US is not to be trusted anymore, every country has a clear signal to build their own nuclear arsenal ASAP. We have a river of blood behind us, so are we just expecting to get lucky that no one in Iran, for instance, who gets to a position of power leverages an irrational hate for the US and just... Does it in a religious or hate-driven Armageddon?

1. The U.S. produces a massive share of global manufactured goods, ranking second globally behind China in total value added.

2. Only low skilled jobs were shipped overseas. Lower-value consumer goods like clothing and basic electronics are heavily outsourced, whereas complex machinery, aerospace equipment, chemicals, and medical devices are largely built domestically

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0222_ma...

During war with China, the US is not going to suffer due to lack of cheap toys or clothes from China.

Although "massive" is a subjective word. Nothing can be as massive as WW2 carpet bombing.

What the fuck is wrong with the human species and its tendency for self-destructive leader-worship??

Washington will have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to pay slightly more and rely on domestic Intel, Samsung, and TSMC fabs, or risk a military defeat and potentially millions of American lives if the situation escalates to intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The choice is obvious. Real life is not a Hollywood action movie. Also, anyone who thinks South Korea or other Asian allies would automatically go to war with China is delusional. So U.S. would be left alone. U.S. has never faced an opponent like China so a country that is also the world's leading manufacturing power. Nazi Germany was nowhere near as economically and industrially formidable as China is today, and the U.S. fought it alongside most of Europe and the Soviet Union.

If anything happens, Taiwan will probably give up. They are mostly posturing, and China may not even need to invade. they could simply impose a blockade.

Bombing things may seem normal to the U.S., but as Sun Tzu argued, the best victories are achieved without fighting, once swords are clashing, that's a strategic failure.

So it means we aren't fighting in Iran the way we would in defending a hypothetical invasion of the lower 48 states, great.

But does it mean we'd fight any differently in the South China Sea, a Russian incursion into Poland, etc. Unclear, and presidential whim based.

I've seen the same logical fallacy used everywhere; including people hyping Russia and China.

All the money in the military has gotten us, almost certainly, the ability to conquer virtually any plot of land anywhere on the planet at any time.

But that does not (thankfully) intrinsically generate the political resolve required to do so.

Democracy and markets are beautiful things. It's fantastic that it can constrain even a military as mighty as the US and a commander in chief as braindead as Trump.

Complexity.

There are too many parties. There are too many bespoke party-party contract. There are too many new middle-parties being created, with their own contracts. There are too many systems. There's too much tech debt.

That's a reason improvements to the US healthcare system have generally been via HHS/CMS imposing standardization mandates ('or no Medicare payments').

But providers, facilities, and insurers (most operating on low margins) can't be collectively more meta-efficient without simplifying the system.

Single payer / Medicare for all is a critical start not because of coverage, but because of simplicity.

There are so many intractable problems with the current system simply by virtue that changing anything about them requires 100s of parties to update 10,000s of party-party contracts and interfaces.

That's the biggest source of waste in the current system: constant duplicative re-engineering.

Health insurance company margins are meaningless. All the large insurers are actually "pay-viders", meaning they own huge (and growing) chunks of the physicians (providers) they pay out.

Go read STAT's Colossus investigative series on the myriad ways UnitedHealth Group abuses this structure. All the other pay-viders do the same.

Pay-viders can "generate x% profit" for any value of x. They control all the relevant levers, which also by coincidence eliminates any incentive in the entire system to reduce costs.

They are required by law to only make a certain value of x, and so, surprise surprise, they all make x!

In Afghanistan, there are some mountains, but they are in the middle. The Taliban fucked off into the mountains and they couldn't do jack.

Iran on the other hand is a plateau fortress lined by mountains on all (accessible to US/western allies) sides. A land invasion of Iran means no supply lines and no way out. The words "one does not simply" come to mind. It is essentially the ultimate meat grinder unless you can win decisively in days, which is impossible because the entire apparatus you are trying to destroy is distributed within aforementioned mountains and operates with decentralised/autonomous command that has been preparing for this exact eventuality (being invaded by an opponent with vastly more firepower and overwhelming air superiority) for the last 40 years. Not to mention absolute fucking hellscape it will be for troops on the ground with FPV drones and Shahed flying into clusters of US marines and being broadcast on Telegram.

A land invasion of Iran is empire suicide. You can't win, you can't go home and you are left with just pouring an infinite amount of resources and lives into the most asymmetric and geographically hostile theatre of all time.

I don't know that that's the case. There are almost certainly plans for a long deep ongoing offensive campaign. But you can't do an ongoing campaign and keep saying it's a short term thing and expect logistics to work.

I don't think so. The US military still has the same Gulf War kind of punch. It's the same armed forces that supported multiple large scale military engagements and outright invasions without requiring changes to it's economy.

But that requires preparation and planning.

Trump did nothing of the sort, and forced the us military into an untenable position. The same armed forces that could easily occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq can't even support a limited engagement with Iraq until they started running out of ammo. That tells you everything about the level of planning that went into this mess.

You're missing the whole point. The point is not that missiles are easy to build. The point is that military interventions planned not only to prop up logistics but also to accommodate for supply constraints. There is no plan on earth that consists of firing a constant barrage of expensive missiles, and instead you have armed forces planning around using dumb and cheap alternatives that are easier to source and provision.

And Trump did nothing of the sort. There was no plan, no exit strategy, nothing. Not even a war declaration to kickstart the country's logistics infrastructure. Of course ammo runs out if there is no plan to provision it.

> This isn't the 1940s anymore where you can convert every car factory into making tanks and missiles.

That's also another point you missed. Trump even failed to mobilize the infrastructure to supply with basic ordnance. There is no plan.

Pay attention to what you are saying yourself: how do you start a war when you don't even secure your own supply needs for the first weeks of the engagement?

Did the entity now known as the USA defeat the British in the mid-1770s or did it just get a little too expensive and more of a headache than it was worth for the British to hold on to them?

It feels like semantics here. The US empire hasn't been defeated but its specific invasions have been.

But just knowing the US military is too weak to accomplish its objectives doesn't help much, because the US leadership is so mercurial it might decide to attack anyway. The deterrent effect only helps if you have rational leadership who is capable of evaluating the chance of failure.

Repelling such an invasion, while possible, is still a pyrrhic victory for whoever the US is attacking, because so much of their population will suffer in the invasion regardless.

Except for the capability to prevail in those conflicts.

On the other hand the US did prevail in Iraq, and often prevails in smaller interventions such as Kosovo, or various strikes on particular targets.

>Since then they've been voluntarily giving up much of that industrial advantage out of greed.

American workers just don't want to do those jobs any more, at least not enough of them, and the country won't tolerate enough immigration to make up the shortfall domestically. There just aren't tens of millions of Americans sitting around waiting to take up manufacturing jobs. If citizens prefer to do other jobs, then non citizens have to do them, whether that's in the USA or outside it.

But even that, let's remember that the British invaded and occupied Washington, burned down White House and Capitol, etc etc.

Tactical defeat is when you are prevented from meeting your objectives for a particular operation, such as securing a target area or destroying/degrading a target enemy force. Strategic defeat is when the enemy prevents you from achieving your broader objectives (typically political, as war is politics by other means). The US has experienced both of these in the last century.

Most active militaries have experienced both types of defeat at one time or another. It’s practically impossible to avoid losing sometimes if you overuse war as a tool of diplomacy.

The US spent years fighting north Vietnamese forces only to sign a peace treaty, leave south Vietnam and then 2 years later have North Vietnam take over South Vietnam and unify the country.

You don't consider completely failing your objectives failure?

US power is mostly strategic, it's 'Air Based' which gives the kind of instant leverage leaders like. It's 'Aircraft Carrier Based'.

The US doesn't have that same overwhelming ability otherwise.

You can't quite an Army overseas - it takes a different kind of logistics esp. in Pacific, one the US doesn't quite have the level of sophistication.

Don't get me wrong - 'it could' but would take a while to ramp up.

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.

You can’t win a war with just air power.

The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.

That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.

I mean if we look at all recent wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and now Iran we completely failed in our objectives. We spend billions, kill a lot of people and get a lot of our own people killed and didn't manage to instill democracy anywhere. How is that not losing the wars? It's complete failure to do what we set out to do 3 times now in recent history.

Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).

And the Caribbean.