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0 pointsifwinterco1mo ago0 comments

The US military is also just less powerful than it was at its peak at the end of the Cold War as well.

Still the most powerful navy in the world, but spread increasingly thin (turns out "the whole world" is quite a big place).

This is no longer Reagan's (almost) 600 ship navy, and projecting power halfway round the world is no mean feat when your opponent can lob missiles and drones at you from their back garden

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overfeed1mo ago· 1 in thread

I don't see how more more American war ships in the strait would change the calculus of the Iran war without. Even if they packed the strait with ships so that an admiral could walk from Oman to Iran without getting their shoes wet, Iran could still lob drones and missiles from inland.

ifwintercoOP1mo ago

Yep both things are true - it would be harder to operate in the gulf today than it was in 1990 because of better drones and missiles, but also they are short of ships and it’s limiting their options.

They don’t have enough ships to simultaneously attack Iran, defend US bases and their gulf “allies” and also enforce this blockade, so they’re forced to pick and choose and it is constraining them strategically.

Having twice as many ships wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem (they’re fairly screwed either way at this point), but it would give them more optionality

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