alt Hacker News> We should have plenty of precision missiles left today because they should have been used only to clear the way for runs with "dumb" bombs.
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.
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China, in it's modern incarnation, and every living member of it's military, has never seen a single real battle. Nothing. No one has any rank that has bearing on any kind of combat. Just decades of self-congratulatory war games.
China has tons of weapons and resources. But it would remain to be seen if they can actually fight when every single person along the entire chain is a total day one rookie.
The problem is production capacity. The US has gutted the lower-value parts of its supply chains, closed refineries and foundries left and right, and is thoroughly unequipped to even produce cheap weapons at the rate required to support a war.
The number of airplanes built in the US during WWII is greater than all the airplanes NOT in that category. Obviously we can't maintain that level of industry during peacetime, but we've fallen so far below that level and are so low on weapons that if another major war starts we won't even be able to rapidly scale up.
> 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.
Looks a lot like the US went into this war assuming it's a rerun of the Iraq war where they could build a mountain of supplies in Saudi Arabia where they were effectively unreachable for the enemy, and take advantage or the friendly skies just across Iraq's border to support their air superiority, and keep the long and lengthening logistics lines protected.
It wasn't a rerun. They can't stock up and just stay beyond Iran's border to be safe, now everything they care about has to stay far, far away, out of drone or missile reach. Any supply lines can be hit far behind the front line so they were non-existent.
> That's what the US tried to do.
Yes but with the caveat that they wanted the lowest risk to US service members during the bombing. This means using up the fire and forget stuff rather than the guided munitions attached to planes. They have good air superiority, but poor logistical options to do that.
The traditional way to do this is to park two carrier groups within 500 miles of the target and convey tonnes of cheap munitions to the targets (as in iraq, Libya & kosovo) the problem for the US is that it means parking a carrier within drone range. You'd then establish a land base and move forward. Again all of the logistics of doing that are vulnerable to drone.
So this is the route they chose.
Until the US have something to counter drones cheaply, then they'll get stuck like this.