A third option is for the US to throw Israel under the bus and either cut military funding to them, or force them to contain themselves by treaty, join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and so on, under that threat.
Since Israel have been goading for this war, spoiling any diplomacy (by killing the Iranian diplomats), and seem to have no intention of ceasing fire until Iran is completely fractured, I think they are the ones who need to be stopped.
Iran would perhaps re-agree to the terms and inspections they were previously under if Israel were also forced to submit. America would then re-establish it's authority in the region to some extent.
I'd feel remiss not to point out that we had all of the objectives in Iraq completed within 3 weeks - it was the nation building cleanup that became the quagmire.
After 6 weeks in Iran we are worse off than we started and the long term implications are so much worse.
By all accounts the JCPOA was a success and working effectively when Trump cancelling it in 2018. We're here because he felt the need to solve the problem of his own making.
All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts.
Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work.
Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise.
Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure.
For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor.
So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule.
It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong.
8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t.
You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009.
Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people.
Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign.
When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago.
Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach.
Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal.
In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong.
I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing.
But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there.
We live in interesting times.
(If nine of us) "look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging on the assumption that the other nine are wrong." [1]
[1] https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/world-war-z-transcript/...
You know that in movies where the military is depicted they have consultants to mix fact with fiction, right?
Does the concept of the tenth man sound like fiction or something that is actually useful in a military context, Sherlock?
Presumably your defensiveness (edit: and your downvote) is because you feel attacked. Not my intention, nor was it to associate an organizational concept with its presentation to tarnish it somehow. I think HN readers are pretty observant that fact and fiction are mixed in modern media. I didn't mean "copy" as in "borrowed", I just noticed it was word-for-word.
If I were to "Sherlock" a bit, I would presume you've been attacked before, since you tend to share longer comments, and we all know the more you say online, the more harshly diverse the viewpoints of responses will be. I wish that were not the case. Your comments seem to be detailed and thoughtful, which sadly invites more criticism in the current state of online commenting.
One thing you can do is assume the best intentions of a comment, and respond to that. HN encourages that.
It will be published post mortem one day to be butchered by a Trumpflix adoption. I want to be played by Melania Trump cementing my legacy as the wokest soldier to ever exist. LGBTomahawk+.
JK. Half the shit I’ve seen I don’t remember any longer, and not talking about the other half keeps me alive. I am spending my days making fun of idiots on here and perfecting my BBQ skills.
I’m glad if you enjoy my comments tho. Have a good day sir, or lady, or whatever you feel like today. o7
Bombing Iran into surrendering was never a realistic outcome.
There was regime change, just not in the direction anyone else wanted.
Except it may be even worse than that. While you might expect some infighting among SA factions, the Revolutionary Guard is a distributed force that's ideologically united by both a common religion and a common cause.
Conflating K:D ratio with strategic success typical fallacy, but if Iran game plan is to take hits while hitting back then so far US inability to neutralize/suppress Iranian fires also tactical failure. US can glass 10000s targets but if adversary built to take punches and remain operational (and still down planes), then US tactically failing if goal is knockout/haymaker.
So far US+co generated like 20% of sorties vs Iran than Iraq. We can charitably assume 100% the effectiveness since 100% precision munitions (vs many more hardened targets). But Iran also 5x larger than Iraq. So far it took deploying like 50% of active fleet, and drawing down 25%+ of high end munitions, who knows how much high end interceptors... losing regional basing. Iran still being able to punch back and attrite US air at frankly unsustainable rates = the reality is on paper US may not even have the high-end munition stockpile to tactically defeat Iran in detail without being utterly strategically depleted vs peer adversaries 50x larger (PRC).
Hence TACO threatened to end civilization, because there aren't enough munitions to destroy Iranian MIC, but there's enough to destroy power plants / go counter-value. Or settling for reverse blockade since discretionary magazine depth can sustain outside of standoff range where Iran can't hit back, but basically cedes region to Iranian missile complex.
Iran tactically "won" by allowing US to commit tactical and strategical seppuku by wasting so much fires for ineffective neutralization/suppression that another few weeks and it would be obvious US mathematically couldn't sustain let alone win the air game. TLDR Iran broken 3 of US fingers taking punches to the face, they're not going to come out looking pretty, but break a few more fingers, and US going to to look retarded/crippled for still punching.
The other place I'd push back on this article is its belief that America doesn't want to trim the grass in Iran every few years. We are pretty committed to Iran not having nukes and the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.
> ... and I forget what's going on with Russia...
Well they relaxed sanctions on Russia in the hopes it would counteract the effects of their blunder, that's how it's going.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-oil-sanctions-iran-war-hor...
Otherwise said, America is not trustworthy negotiating partner, because it is already planning to break whatever peace or ceasefire they pretend to make.
And this is one additional reason why Iran absolutely want that straight - if they walk away while it is not their, they are not just loosing money. They are making themselves victims of regular bombing on Israel and USA whim.
https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...
and that's without the oil supply shocks having kicked in properly yet
We not committed at all to an expensive war every few years with Iran. Rather, we should do what China is doing and unwind our dependence on middle eastern oil (or a low world price for while pumped domestically) and just move on to new and better transportation tech.
And surprisingly, the Democrats are even less popular than he is.
If success here means China looks like the good guy and the world is disentangling themselves from the US as fast as possible then, yeah, we are winning. China is taking a hit right now, but it is at the exact moment they are hitting an inflection point in alternative energy. Is their economy actually grinding to a halt right now? I honestly haven't seen a lot of news stories about china actually taking a massive hit but I have seen several speculating they will. The net result here will likely be a big win for China.
> the American people seem to have liked this war and the earlier strike pretty well.
I don't think that is true at all. I think there is a cult of Trump and the republican base hits the hypocrisy button every chance they get so the party propaganda is only saying good things. However, within that base the cracks are there in that they aren't 100% cheering this on. There are quiet people that don't want to disagree with their cult leader so they don't say they disagree, but at the same time they are not saying loudly they actually do agree. This is, I think a telling change. As for the people not in the cult of Trump, I don't know any that are for this. There is a lot of 'Iran is bad' talk, but no 'this was a good idea' talk.
We were actually on a path to international normalization with verifiable nuclear disarmament before Trump 1.0 and here we are, Iran unleashed. Potentially they will get tolls for all traffic and a massive influence boost.
"Clausewitz’s most profound warning was not that war is hard, or that enemies get a vote, or that fog and friction confound the best-laid plans — though he believed all of those things. His deepest warning was about what happens when the political object is unclear or absent from the start."
Even now I can't think of a person that has clearly stated why we did this and what we aim to get out of this. The only plausible explanations I have seen are that Trump wanted a distraction and his only negotiating tactic is to double down hoping the other side will run out of chips. Both domestically and abroad this has been a disaster and will be for the next generation, at least.
Where they really in plural? Where exactly other then Afghanistan? I can think of more places where America explicitly overturned democracy (Iran, Chile) then places where it try to install one.