alt Hacker NewsNo - the Iran war is a total strategic failure, but the US is very obviously 'exceptional' - I'm not saying necessarily admirable, or more moral etc but it is hugely 'stand out' in terms of capabilities. That's just a fact of reality irrespective of all of the political and moral context.
- The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
- "Acts of raw destruction as mean towards a goal is often not ideal " - this is a misrepresentation of US doctrine for decades. Even in Vietnam the US did not pursue 'full war' and refused to do strategic bombing in North Vietnam for a decade. As soon as Nixon did (op: Linebacker) - basically, the US 'won' right away. They decimated N. Vietnamese ability in a very material way. Were that strategy to have been undertaken in 1967, the war would have had a completely different outcome, probably more like Korean detente.
- US is very careful in their campaigns, there are chains of authority, externalizations are always assessed. The rules of engagement may shift a but - but it's false to suggest it's 'arbitrarily destructive' in targeting, it's generally minimal.
If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
All of this is outside of any moral or whatever other consideration - it's just 'what it is'.
The 'important note' here is that 'Power Has Limits' and that's truly the defining characterization of this war. This is not 'America is not capable' is that 'capabilities have limits' - and they become very obvious in difficult ways if power is applied poorly.
The Generals 100% warned Trump of all of this - this conflict is not a military failure in that sense, this is predictable. It's the political apparatus pushing the boundaries. The Generals would have none of this.
Replies
>If you want to see what 'destructive' is, just look at Russian engagement in Ukraine, or Assad in Syria, or Saudi in Yemen. They don't care what they hit, it's a totally different environment.
Show us the difference with Vietnam (and Cambodia).
And the Caribbean.
>The US did not 'lose' the majority of the wars it started - it won most of them, and arguably failed to achieve strategic objectives in some.
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.
> To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.
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.