F-15E jet shot down over Iran(theguardian.com) |
F-15E jet shot down over Iran(theguardian.com) |
You'll never be able to fully suppress all of their manpads. Even if you destroy the bulk of their air defence network.
- 3x F-15 friendly fire
- 2x KC-130 refuel mid air collision (1 loss, 1 damaged)
- 1x F-35 damaged
- 1x AEWACs base strike
- 3x KC-130 base strike (same)
- 1x F-15 (this one)
2-3 a week is not great for the greatest military, more than half attributable to Iran.
With 300+ US casualties, that's ~10/day, a fatality every ~2 days. No boots on the ground (that we know of, sure there are some elite ops in the country)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Not expecting a reply.
Read the section titled 'The Gamble' if you want that opinion, but the tl;dr is that our 2025 strike against Iran ceded our ability to claim dis-involvement in Israeli strikes, and so Israel was able to draw us into this war whether we wanted to or not.
The constitution is old and not democratic.
Russia, Turkey, Phillipines, Belarus, Nicaragua, etc, etc.
Presidential republics are a disaster waiting the right people to break them.
Acceptable win ratio for the U.S. (whom many of you despise).
No. Many people despise the trump administration, not the US.
Much more relevant to the current conflict is that it invalidates the claim that Iran's air defense capabilities are gone.
The US could probably steamroll Russia in a week, because both countries will try to deploy the latest tech they have, and the US blows Russia out of the water. But in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia ... etc, their stealth jets and raptors stand no chance with weapons so old that those new systems didn't even account for.
I did not know Donald posts in here
Iran alone is beating the shit out of US. Thinking it can steamroll Russia is not even funny. Some serious epidemic of Hollywood syndrome permeates the US.
Flying low over Iran at this point is planned, expensive "standoff" munitions were planned to give way to more accurate and less expensive munitions once air superiority was reached - which U.S. has been claiming has happened for a while now.
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/05/iran-f15-crew-member-rescue...
> Approval of Trump among Republicans has slipped to a second-term low of 84%, down from 92% last March. At the same time, an all-time high 16% of Republicans disapprove. This shift can be attributed, at least in part, to declining support among non-MAGA Republicans, as approval dropped 11 points in the last year among this group (70% in March 2025 to 59% today). Virtually all MAGA Republicans continue to approve of Trump, with 98% approving a year ago and 97% now.
> https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-oppose...
The war machine is already rewriting this as Iranian hostility.
The base is incapable of seeing this as a failure of their cult leader.
Instead they'll see it as the very rationale and justification of the war.
If they were ambivalent about it before, now they'll scream bloody murder for even more off-the-leash barbarism from the US and Israel.
I am not going to lie, I am beyond disgusted at the United States.
And the "it's Trump" card doesn't work, Americans defend this travesty of an old non functioning constitution.
What a waste of life and energy.
It turns out, long after Rome had become an Empire and was only a Republic in name only, most Senators still thought of it as a Republic and that this extraordinary state of affairs with the Senate just being a glorified rubber stamp body would soon come to an end and that, they will very soon restore the Senate to its former rightful place, just as soon as this current very limited crises was over.
As it turns out, they were never able to do that again.
It’s so interesting to me that nearly all of the Founding Fathers had read Tacitus and were keenly aware of this and explicitly tried to design a system to prevent that from happening. To their credit, their system lasted a good while.
If we accept your thesis that the US republic is over, it only lasted around half as long as the Roman republic you are saying the "Founding Fathers" were trying to improve upon.
It is about republican congressmen actively supporting all of this.
That's why their main complaints have been procedural: "Why didn't you come to us first with your plans?". And why they slow-walked the vote on a war powers act.
The war has record low approval ratings, even among Trump's base.
Protecting pedos on such a scale?
However, if the direction of the country is being seriously altered via blackmail, IMO that is many orders of magnitude worse than anything they could have done. Like we are currently bombing yet another middle eastern country for no clear reason.
I would personally be open to some kind of Epstein jubilee where we absolve everyone involved in order to nullify the blackmail.
Like it's not great, it's terrible for the victims and for justice, but at the moment we are getting terrible from both ends, could we at least reduce it to one end?
By voting for a party that refuses to promise this?
> Or demand representatives impeach them.
We both know this will do nothing.
Vote for the party least likely to actually start wars. Regardless of their words.
> We both know this will do nothing.
Pardon my imprecise language. I meant impeach, convict, and remove from power.
And what has it to do with distributed architectures. You must not be good at what you do.
The important information was the US was able to rescue their people, loss of equipment doesn't matter. When we removed Bin Laden we lost an helicopter. Equipment loses that don't degrade our capabilities don't matter to the US.
There were ZERO American casualties in an operation in Iran, where the USA basically setup their own airfield, and Iranian forces tried to engage.
Buddy. That is not how winning looks like.
If casualty count is your criteria, then Soviet Union was defeated in world war 2 according to you.
If you think distributed architecture is about rescuing a bunch of people, then clearly you haven't done any serious work in your life. Go write some code and build some distributed systems.
We need a different voting system, we need the structure of Congress gutted, and we need a far less powerful presidency.
The main issues with this war are strategic questions and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication. But otherwise for an air campaign this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
That's an exceptionally nice way of saying we invaded a country for no valid military reason, starting a war of aggression.
We're no better than Russia now, with their invasion of Ukraine.
> ... and people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Well-deserved mockery. He continues to lie about what's happening, every other sentence.
I don't know about you, but the idea of a radical Islamic theocracy and a well known source of Middle East instability having nukes doesn't sit well with me. As far as reasons to invade countries go, this alone would make for a damn good one.
> inconsistent communication
I feel like "inconsistent communication" is putting it lightly, with trump going back and forth between "we won", "we'll take the oil", and "whatever we'll leave" often within the same day.
Iran isn't somehow able to exert infinite economic pressure forever. They can play the chaos monkey, but how much does it helps them? Threats only work on those who cave in to them.
I don't see why they couldn't. The obvious strategy for Iran right now is to use cluster munitions and Shahed waves to expend as many interceptors as possible before sending in the high-throw unitary (or nuclear) warheads. It makes sense that we saw the smaller MRBMs first since they're the cheapest minimum-viable threat.
> this has been about as good as one could expect - within the limits of what an air-only campaign can do.
We're deep in the missile age. Air campaigns like this sucked during the Scud hunt, and it triple-sucks now that America has to contend with drone warfare. The limits of an air-only campaign have been constricting for the past three decades, and the death toll can only climb if the air war fails.
> They should be able to do much more to regional military bases.
Could, they are not going all out, but they do keep striking gulf states on the regular
> people mocking the presidents inconsistent communication.
Asking questions, we the people deserve some clarity instead of half a dozen changing reasons and being told we already won, but still need to win, and that we'll be done in a few weeks a few times now. We the people have to pay for this, we deserve answers, especially what's the plan for when the shooting stops?
Israel, or at least Bibi, seems to be the only one who is very clear about the goals and intentions.
US military is performing quite well. US political leadership is the questionable part of this war.
It would sure be nice if White House gave a reason to believe that there's an actual plan for dismantling Iran's regime, or Iran's influence, that goes beyond "wing it".
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-israel-trump-lebanon-apri...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563815
$700 per plane, might be $1B considering the shortage of parts.
Its only value is to see the desired responses from Fox News and the far-right media.
https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-the-myth-of-the-all-p...
Either the majority of Americans want this war, in which case the Dems have to be quiet, or they don’t, in which case the dems should be making it the number one issue.
Sadly I suspect the answer is not in the side of the Hollywood version of post ww2 America.
Now is the time to insert the “are we the bad guys” meme.
By "loudest supporters" - are you referring to the donor class? Money is speech, after all.
The Democratic party has an identity crisis: it's failing to balance special interests and their traditional constituents - post-Goldwater/ southern-strategy. Instead of activating their base, they seem to be courting the political center that has been hollowed out by Maga and polarization, incidentally matching the desires of their donors who abhor any kind of populist leftist politics, including anything in instituted by FDR.
No, I don't believe so. I'm talking about the people who convinced them that culture wars were the right way to do battle with a conservative opponent despite that being automatically an uphill battle. The dem leadership focused on issues that polled well with a small group of loud people on a crusade, and largely ignored bread & butter issues that resonate with people less politically inclined. But centrist votes are counted just the same as partisan ones, and more plentiful.
> The dems have no power against a unified GOP front
They absolutely do. The war powers act is “bi partisan” And they can protest the war strongly on moral and budgetary grounds for starters. The war is incredibly unpopular with the Dem base and even independents. Opposing it is a layup. (But, like I said, the truth is Dem leadership wants the war)
> and they already look pretty weak on issues like this.
Fighting (whether winning or losing) shows strength not weakness and is what voters react to. Standing down is exactly NOT what they should do. C’mon, man!
> They are trying to figure out how they can mollify their base while attracting enough centrist voters to retake Congress later this year
Like I said the war is UNPOPULAR so OPPOSE it. Winning stat.
> year. I don't care for the dem leadership but I feel a little sympathy for them
NO! They’re “blundering” when they don’t have to. (But see points about Schumer wanting the war)
> Catering to their loudest supporters is a pretty big reason they are the minority party right now.
Also a backwards take. They’re a minority party because they’d rather lose and maintain power than oppose the capitalists who own them.
Name one instance of this actually happening. I'll wait.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/19/imaginary-frie...
The US Army becoming Israel’s strike force, at the hands of rapist, what a time to be alive
The war does, Trump does not. He maintains very strong support among the base, and that is the part keeping the GOP politicians in line. It is why some of them just resign instead of enduring the threats from his supporters.
Any time this administration cries "fake news" is probably a tell.
> Flying low over Iran at this point is planned…
But with C-130s and helos, in an area that just shot down a F-15? That's risky. One of the videos shows the C-130 deploying flares.
> An F-15 fighter jet pilot has been rescued alive by the U.S. military after their aircraft went down over Iran, a U.S. official said Friday.
> White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump had been briefed on the incident — the latest dramatic development in the war, now more than a month old.
CENTCOM lied.
Or he (I assume) could also have been found dead, and is not being mentioned before his family is notified of the sacrifice Donald Trump made of his life.
The one shot down was an E though so two people.
Which dem leadership? The only crusade I remember was Kamala Harris going on a national tour with Liz Cheney and brightly signaling her rightward shift. Somehow, "Republicans for Kamala" failed to save her campaign in the swing-states.
> people who convinced them that culture wars were the right way to do battle
Who are they exactly?
> The dem leadership focused on issues that polled well with a small group of loud people on a crusade, and largely ignored bread & butter issues that resonate with people less politically inclined
Which issues, specifically?
> centrist votes
You think there’s some huge swath people who’d vote Dem if it wasn’t for their pesky (and incredibly mild) protective stance towards trans people, for example?
Honestly curious which sources do you get your political news from mainly?
Really the rot set in with the pardons of Nixon and Oliver North.
It's not like a blackmail ring is that easy to set up, it seems to have taken a lot of heavy lifting to get this one going.
Their actions are the foundation for everything that came after.
If the American government continues to perform actions that are blatantly against the interests of America and Americans, the impact of that on Americans is going to be (and may be already) massively massively worse than the person to person level crimes we are focusing on.
Does it just feel so bad thinking about it that a lot of people have a hard time even going there mentally? I really don’t get it.
I know it's conspiratorial, and I hate that, but it's one of the only things that makes any of the actions of the US in the last year make any semblance of sense.
I don't like to think that, but it remains, for me, a valid scenario.
Between
- ADL
- StandWithUs
- AIPAC
- Zionist Organization of America
- Foundation to Combat Anti-Semitism
- Act.IL / RiseAPP
- Israel Hub
and more, there's enough resources to get Their People into moderator positions at /r/conservative.
They're committing a genocide and now are ethnically cleansing Lebanon of Muslims under the cover of the Iran War. Their government is not worthy of support.
... but there's certainly no shortage of Zionist pressure and lobby groups wanting leverage and influence.
US leadership can just say "this isn't enough to deter us" and proceed with the rest of the war however they want.
I suggest not taking anything Trump says as the truth: https://xcancel.com/chrismartenson/status/203952370406177223...
“Does it matter?”
Yes, Who cares about the rest of the world?
Nations shutting down, businesses shutting down, and all because the elected leader of America got involved in a war to avoid accusations of pedophilia.
And lest we forget, this is the nuclear superpower. Thank god there is no conspiracy theory about Nukes being useful so far. I have more faith that the administration will bend towards conspiracies than away from them.
No such button exists, and it's increasingly clear that this war will leave the entire world far worse off while further entrenching the current Iranian regime.
Iranian regime wasn't doing that well even when it wasn't actively bombed. And "rally around the flag" only goes so far in a country that has been killing protestors by the thousands.
I don't see this war ruining Iran's regime overnight as is. But if it comes up with a sustained effort to pressure Iran, or a ground operation to topple the regime directly, it well might.
Hardliners and the IRGC have significantly more power than before, and however few moderates that remain have much less political capital and are at much greater risk of being purged.
If Iran doesn't win significant concessions tayt the sucker-punch attacks will never be repeated again[1], they are guaranteed to sprint towards the minimum viable nuke.
1. Bibi will refuse, obviously, and Americas capacity to leash him is questionable.
Have China the guarantor, build military bases, and put them under their nuclear deterrence umbrella. Iran can be assured they won't be bombed, the West can be assured they won't have nukes. (in theory, I largely assume the CCP will not aid in their construction or let them have nukes under such an arrangement).
Thing is, all the little countries are looking at what happened to Ukraine (who gave up their nukes), Iran (who has not gotten them yet), and North Korea (who has them). Their looking and thinking, if I had nukes, I probably wouldn't be the target of regime change.
Mutually Assured Destruction has worked for 75 years, China is aggressively expanding their stockpiles. Would the US or Israel risk a war with China over Iran if they get the assurances from the Chinese they will keep Iran on a tight leash?
> Why would China agree to that?
Ultimately the aim to displace the US as the world hegemon. Having bases across the world is what hegemons do.
Realistically there is no amount that Iran would be willing to pay and that China would be willing to accept for China to essentially agree to be responsible for the defense of Iran. It’s a non-starter.
Pre-war, the situation was bad enough that dropping bombs on Iran's key decision-makers might have actually made the government more moderate on average. Not that it matters much. "More moderate" in context of Iran's government isn't anywhere near "moderate" either way.
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/03/world/iran-war-trump...
> A second Air Force combat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf region on Friday, and the lone pilot was safely rescued, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The A-10 Warthog attack plane went down near the Strait of Hormuz about the same time that an Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, the officials said. In that incident, one crew member was rescued and search-and-rescue operators are looking for the second airman. Officials provided scant details about the A-10 crash, including how and where it happened.
there's some additional osint rumor mill that a blackhawk helicopter involved in rescue operations was also shot down but claims that crew been recovered
No such analogous advantage exists in Iran, which is a much larger country, with better air defenses, and no western contractors ready to provide back doors into systems.
And 3 weeks in to the war and the US is flying refueling tankers to refuel Blackhawks in the very area the F-15 was shot down to recover the pilots (1 so far has been received) should be much more informative than it seems to be.
But sure... the KARI system in Iraq.
- De facto language of aviation (i.e. manuals) is English, and the regime had just purged most of the English speakers before the thing started
- They had these advanced ground defense systems and...didn't use the targeting, they were just spraying in the air
I don't know how well the Iranians can use their tools but I bet they're better than that.
Given Iran ought to have far better SAM systems than Iraq 35 years ago, this comparison doesn't seem in any way alarming.
For a more direct comparison, in the first 5 weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia flew approximately 7000 combat sorties and 22 fixed wing aircraft were shot down.
If Iran can do this with AWACS, they can do even more with the hundreds of fighter jets in Israeli and US bases (it's much easier to cover up the destruction of an F-15 or F-35). Once this war ends, I think we'll see that most of the aircraft kills are going to be on the ground.
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...
This was inevitable and just a question of time. Out of >10k sorties something is going to get hit. I've no idea what range the military planners expected and how we're doing vs. that.
It's absolutely a bad sign. One among many.
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
(In 1991, the United States relied on the F-117 Nighthawk to penetrate Baghdad and launch salvos against radar and SAM sites. Simultaneously, Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against similar communication and defense sites. In this war with Iran, the F-35 and B-2 have been used for stealth missions).
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/missiles/358-missile-S...
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/02/politics/iran-missiles-us-mil...
Doesn't break out anti-air, but Iran absolutely has a lot of teeth left.
What we can tell though is that Iran is still firing missiles (including cluster munitions) at Israel's civilians and at gulf states. So the ground facts are that it can still do that.
We also have to remember that Iran has a large number of different missile systems for different ranges. It's mostly not the same missiles they are firing at the nearby gulf states as they are firing into Israel. Some of the longer range missile systems they have need to be fired from western Iran to make it to Israel. There's a lot of other nuance, solid fuel vs. liquid fuel, mobile vs. fixed launchers etc.
With the price of oil having skyrocketed, and the new revenue that will be coming from the Hormuz tolls, they will also be rebuilding their previous capacity in no time.
2) The initial US degradation of Iraqi capabilities was much much greater in gulf war 1.
3) F15s are not stealth fighters.
4) This is 35 years later.
5) "strategic bombing" of air defenses is mostly accomplished with our cruise missiles. We'll take out any air defenses we find, but you don't fly non-stealth planes over SAM batteries intentionally.
We haven't even started a ground campaign. If one plane is downed per 13000 missions, I think we're doing ok.
It's difficult to compare; but Iran today is not Iraq then. F-15s are now based on a design that's 30 years older. Shoulder launched SAMs have moved on.
I'm not sure what happened here, but in the Gulf War, there was a move to medium altitudes after a dodgy first night and I've seen some footage that, if accurate and if I'm not getting it wrong, suggests there are different tactics going on here.
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
The US has decided to step into Russia's shoes in Iran for reasons and I would be shocked if Russia/China aren't also providing similar aid for Iran.
They don't need it though. Our top brass knew this war is stupid twenty years ago.
Without nukes we'll lose this war and badly.
So far we have lost seven airplanes. There's no deep meaning behind one F-15e being shot down (if that's what happened): it's not a stealth aircraft and it's not heavily armored.
Everyone loves missiles, but could it have been guns? Was it flying low?
Remember when some helicopters were being shot down by RPG's and everyone was like 'whooo, no way, that can't be, they aren't accurate enough".
We know Iran is driving around bongo trucks with small SAM systems on the back that use passive IRST rather than radar. The missiles themselves have the capability to cruise in the air for some period of time searching for a target before kicking in the engine for a last, fast sprint to the target. Because they are electro-optical (and piloted by a human), even early-warning and flare deployments won't do very much against a skilled operator.
Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
That plus likely a miscalculation...pushing into territory that is more contested than believed
A few minutes ago Tasnim posted photos of a separate wreckage that seems to be of an F-16 that was also downed today.
These events should not be confused with the F-35 that CNN reported was hit a few days ago.
75000+ palestinians killed, arguably one of the defining crimes of our age are not worth HN discussion (“politics”) but one F15E shot down in a war of choice is (apparently, “tech”)?
those lives seem to be way less worthy of press judging for the coverage the left want to put in Palestinian people.
it doesn't follow the principle of equal value on lives but a political agenda and mountains of useful trend followers
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I guess this gets in as interesting new phenomenon?
That' a cop-out.
The SA-67 is essentially a hybrid surface-to-air missile and loitering drone that operates like an airborne mine. It’s a pretty innovative weapon: instead of relying on a fast, highly detectable rocket motor, it uses a small gas turbine and passive infrared seeker to silently loiter in a combat zone and then ambush aircraft without ever triggering their traditional radar warning receivers.
I do wonder if Iran finds them first, will they treat them better than the US treated survivors of the ship sunk by a US torpedo in the Indiana Ocean?
This is what real sanctions look like. The west broke the deal, attacked like terrorists, and are now being sanctioned.
Who's us?
> This is what real sanctions look like
You mean raising the price of oil and gas for the worlds largest producer of both oil and gas?
> attacked like terrorists
Attacked the country who took 'protection money' and used it to build up enough conventional munitions to make stopping their program prohibitively costly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an...
Iran: 40, Israel: 18, US: 36, Others: 7
The F117 is a very stealthy plane, given its geometry (flat panels). Yet a 1960s radar with essentially no digital equipment took it out, largely using human intelligence and guerrilla tactics.
Iran has modern digital electronics (to improve the signal to noise ratio, merge different data sources, etc) and modern electronics. They are also master guerrilla fighters and have, great, native missile technology.
Iranian airspace is contested at best. We certainly do not have air superiority over it.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/american-fighter-jet-f15e-downe...
The current F-15 crash incident happened today near the city of Lali, in Iran’s Khuzestan Province.
Iran tweets about taking down an American jet basically daily. By their count we are down 40 f-35s, 4 aircraft carriers and thousands of MQ-9s.
Average comments sentiment when an American is caught while bombing bridges and elementary schools: poor thing hope they treat him well
https://preview.redd.it/f35-i-shot-down-in-iran-v0-0gdyroc4o....
I think it's ok to say that it crashed into the ground but the pilot survived.
With 'emergency landing' people assume it was just a rough landing whereas the plane here is completely and utterly broken.
Then again idk the jet exhaust becomes more significant not sure if afterburner or damage
https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1ry6ma2/f35_...
The A-10 flies slower and closer than our fighter jets which means they have more time to assess the situation before taking action.
Warplanes are disposable. They are built to be shot down. If they aren't, they are not being used intensely enough or are just wrong tools for the job - a warplane that flies a mission and always comes back is like a test that never fails.
But this is next level. When it started I thought Iran would be crushed. Ignorant, silly me.
There is every chance the USA will have to stop its attacks before achieving any goals.
An education, thus is, that I could do without.
In New Zealand we will probably run out of diesel soon.
This is so stupid, so sadistic and cruel
You've picked a high bar there.
"U.S. Conducting Rescue Operation After Jet Went Down Over Iran"
I feel that the current war is by far the most closest to showing to people that this war is waged by the rich. Because they are the primary ones to benefit right now (if we ignore Netanyahu, but Netanyahu's war goals "make sense", e. g. this is done for expansion and/or control; Trump's involvement makes no real sense, except for benefitting some with insider trading and making other cronies rich).
Oh, I thought it was to stop the Iranians having nuclear weapons "in the next few weeks".
- DJT, 11 March
“I think we’ve won"
- DJT, 20 March
“We’ve won this war. The war has been won"
- DJT, 24 March
“We are winning so big"
- DJT, 25 March
What a clown show...
The thing about the First Gulf War was that it was four months of buildup, 45 days achieving air superiority, and about 100 hours of a ground war. It was well planned, and involved a collation of of forces that shared a common purpose and common goal. The allied coalition made sure to get their intelligence correct and worked hard to disassemble the Iraqi defenses before sending the armed forces into real danger.
The current conflict involved Donald Trump thinking that Iran, a nation of 93 million people with a relatively healthy economy (at least at the national and regime level, which can sell a lot of petroleum), was going to put up the same kind of fight that Iraq did, then a nation of 18 million with old tech, or like Venezuela did, a nation of perhaps 30 million today, that has faced extended total economic collapse, hyper inflation, and a mass exodus of something like a quarter of the population over the past 6-10 years. There was virtually no planning, with initial action going off of intelligence of where Khomeini would be and just jumping at that.
We've got an administration run by a narcissist that has surrounded himself with sycophants and bottom feeders. He's pissed off every ally we have, acted prematurely as the aggressor with an assassination strike, and now doesn't have the resources to protect the strategic assets in the region let alone convince Iran that the conflict needs to end in our favor. Just a ridiculous number of unforced errors. A complete embarrassment.
Military technology moves faster than most people think.
More advanced than the F-117? The B-2? The SR-71? Nah.
Maybe you're confusing the F-15 and the F-35?
And you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are definitely not eastern Washington lol
Source: lived there.
Seems like it's all about vacating the area and busting out the CSEL (or NGSR when materialized) personal SAR comms is the best way out, or it may well turn into a weeks(s) long, nonstop spy-shit ordeal getting out. Perhaps some forethought and packing with knowledge and specific local-appropriate items (and chunk of cash) would help more than MIL-STD Walmart camping aisle prepper bullshit.
Military personnel captured as prisoners of war are not hostages. Unlike embassy personnel held hostage during the 1979 revolution, it's unclear if military POWs have any value to leverage against the US, considering how its leader feels about about "people who get captured" and "they knew what they signed up for". We're only hearing about this so the administration can get ahead of the narrative instead of Iran. Otherwise, it's doing everything it can to hide information about the cost of war in terms of monetary cost and casualties.
The hostages here are the so-called "allies" in the Arab world who received no notice of the invasion and were sitting ducks for wide-scale regional retaliation from Iran due to them hosting US bases.
Poor choice of words. Hostage taking is illegal, but any captured US aviators would be prisoners of war, whose detention is entirely legal as long as they're treated humanely.
edit: I'm baffled by the amount of downvotes pointing out the objectively correct terminology can get. Its not a matter of opinion, military personnel captured by the enemy are pow no matter their treatment. A hostage, by definition, has been abducted.
what a fucking mess.
If the US military would like this war to stop they could not fight it, that would be pretty easy I think. Probably not without consequences, but that would show actual courage. Whereas dropping bombs on civilian from afar shows zero.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5150259-u-s-air-force-su...
“He’s not a war hero ... I like people who weren’t captured.”
"Iran Secretly Purchased Verba MANPADS From Russia for $589 Million" - https://militarnyi.com/en/news/iran-secretly-purchased-verba...
and they have the Misagh-3 that has an interesting laser system to avoid and ignore decoy flares. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misagh-3
But it seems they are pretty pissed off with the Chinese, since they spent a few hundred million on their defense systems, that turned to be a complete failure. This was also after the HQ-9B failed to adequately protect high-value targets in Pakistan during India Operation Sindoor,
"Chinese HQ-9B again in spotlight after reports of failure of Iranian air defence system amid US-Israel strikes" - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/chinese-hq...
You're definitely right that passive seekers are playing a huge role here, though. Many people online (and on HN) bought into the air dominance shtick just because major radar sites were taken offline. It was always the road mobile and TELAR vehicles that would be a threat.
Early 2000s RTS games (Starcraft 1, Warcraft 3, CnC franchise) continue to amaze me in how well their seemingly comical "game physics" model the intrinsic dynamics of real world conflicts, almost prophetically.
All that said, not sure there should be any sympathy for soldiers bombing any country on the pretext of some "preventive" war.
If so, I assume you're also upset about the bad hombres crossing the US southern border. After all, they are killers and rapists, right?
Not sure if it’s possible to treat enemies better than that. And I doubt the Iranians will treat a US pilot well. Look at how they treat their own citizens.
Mind you, the details of war are not always clear. The US says that the ship was armed, and it also says that they did make an effort to rescue the crew. The US does not explain why it failed to actually rescue anybody, of course.
You don’t have to project your own shortcomings to other people.
If you can't imagine how, that says a lot about you.
https://www.beachesofnormandy.com/didyouknow/Did_you_know_wh...
There was zero threat to that American submarine, they fired on an unarmed ship that the US Navy had just held ceremonial activities with literally days prior. Absolutely disgusting behaviour but we can't expect anything less from the Americans unfortunately.
The fact that Israel has leveled much of the 140 square miles of gaza over the past 3 years and still fails to remove Hamas from power. No chance against 636,372 square miles and 93 million people. Worse odds than Vietnam. There isn't even a defined victory condition.
It's even worse if you consider what rational options the mullahs have. Yes, they are a murderous dictatorship and enemies of US - no question about that. But they did nothing to provoke this particular attack and they still got bombed.
Backing off without first inflicting severe pain is just not an option in this situation. It would be an invitation to get bombed at will.
I'm imagining the air crew going "Huh, there are no clear actual targets to bomb. Hey, Cleetus, command won't be happy about us not bombing anything at all, retarget on that school over there, let's get this over with and go home."
CENTCOM tweeted that no shootdown occurred only for Iran to show the wreckage and one of the ejection seats. CENTCOM said Iran didn't shoot down the F-35, but it apparently crashed in Saudi Arabia and we sent out a Chinook to run search patterns to find it.
CENTCOM claimed a single Kuwait (ghost of Kuwait?) shot down three different F-15s by accident, but those planes were close enough to Iran that they could have been targeted by Iran (which seems more likely than the massive chain of mistakes required for the Kuwaiti shootdown to happen).
CENTCOM also only talks about US planes shot down and excludes Israeli F-15 that have been hit. CENTCOM also doesn't count all the very expensive drones that have been shot down, but their total value is at least a half-billion dollars.
Finally, CENTCOM is straight-up lying about air superiority. They claimed they'd switched to gravity bombs, but people instantly noticed that all the planes going up were using long-range JASSM stand-off missiles so they don't have to actually go very far inside Iran and can keep their planes in a safer section of the country. CENTCOM loaded up a B-52 with JDAMs and took a couple pictures, but all the pictures after that photo-op still show super-expensive JASSM (costing as much as $1.6M each).
If our planes never enter their airspace, there's nothing for them to shoot down. I'd note they've also shot down a couple of JASSM missiles which is interesting itself as the radar cross-section of a JASSM is believed to be pretty close to an F-35.
Iran is currently using bongo trucks with an IRST and a couple missiles that can even loiter in the air if there's no target. Being electro-optically guided means they are passive and the human element makes them a lot less likely to miss due to chaff.
These little trucks can hide ANYWHERE and because they aren't a massive multi-vehicle setup like a Patriot or S-300, they should be able to relocate often and quickly (they might even be able to stay mobile while in operation). This mobility combined, ability to hide as a normal truck, and completely passive sensors make them almost impossible to find and destroy.
Seriously, it's been sitting on this for entire month and now, all of a sudden, rolled out antiaircraft defense? What's going on?
Instead, they will fight this war by absorbing blow after blow, hiding their capabilities and striking back when it is advantageous.
All Iran needs to do to win is:
1) Outlast the US air campaign - note this only requires protecting enough of their defensive capabilities to remain difficult. It does not require shooting down every US aircraft that enters their borders. It does not require shooting down most aircraft that enter their borders.
2) Prevent free shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
That's it. They just need to apply economic pain as domestic and international opposition to the unprovoked attack grows.
You sound like they roll an antiaircraft cannon out of the hangar and immediately successfully down a plane. That's not how that works. The AA was probably there from the beginning, just not successful.
1. Iran was retarded and didn't preemptively strike US staging who had local overmatch and first mover advantage. Nothing to do but weather hits, chip away at regional basing and wait until US+Israel operation tempo goes down. Can't sustain surge sorties forever, especially with regional logistics wrecked. US pilots tired now, on stims, making mistakes.
2. Iran not remain retarded, was hide and bide, waited for US to get complement, gathering data / building tactics to squeeze out surface-air without getting glassed. Regardless, Iranian capability seems much less degraded than claimed. Who knows how many of the 20k+ targets hit was basically just drawing down highend munition inventory, which now forces flying closer on lower end munitions.
At the end of the day, Iranian mosaic forces are chilling in underground bunkers waiting for US+co to make mistakes. Consider Iraq, a much smaller country by every metric ate 5x more sorties from more carriers and sustained regional air campaign and fell because they hedged on centralized IADs. Granted most Iranian hits are precision munitions (more efficient per sortie), but we simply should not expect Iran doctrine built on distributed survivability to be remotely defeated relative to effort expended.
There was a lot of Iranian AA losses in the opening phase of this war. US went town on anything that looked remotely like AA to secure the sky for themselves, and operated with ever-increasing impunity since.
Between advanced ISR, stealth, ECM and stand-off munitions, US has a lot of tools to make the lives of AA crews into a living hell.
It's unclear what happened here exactly. It might be a "straggler" SAM that wasn't destroyed in the strikes, might be US going too aggressively and putting reduced survivability airframes within an area that wasn't sufficiently cleared, might be an Iranian adaptation not unlike the "SAMbushes" seen in Ukraine.
I don't see it as a sign that Iran is somehow reconstituting its AA capabilities though.
It really isn't. A huge portion of Iran's air defenses are designed for road-mobility and pop-up attacks instead of long-term point defense, encompassing hundreds of launchers total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Islam...
Military strategists long warned that air campaigns flying over South Iran would have to contend with passively-guided SAMs and MANPADS on their way to Tehran. There are hundreds of road-accessible caves in the Zagros range that cannot be inspected via satellite. They inherently present a risk to overflights unless they are occupied on the ground first; it's common knowledge why Kohgiluyeh and Fars are so dangerous.
As for why America is involved in a conflict between Israel and Iran, it's because we have a Republican administration and a big segment of Republicans (Christian Evangelicals) want the US to ensure Israel as a state survives (also for purely fanatical reasons).
So, when are we bombing Israel to prevent the world being held hostage by nuke-wielding religious fanatics?
and the starting point of all this is the US coup in Iran that eventually lead to the islamists seizing power in Iran.
1982, Israel invades Lebanon. Iran backs Hezbollah, which triggers its first killing of Israelis in 1983.
There would have been reasons to back the creation of Hamas long before 1982 but the revolution in Iran only took place in 1979, so through the decades of Palestinian oppression, massacres and occupation, Iran was aligned, so it started with a support for Lebanese resistance. Then much later the backing of Palestinian resistance, then Yemen via the Houthis.
It is true there has been constant funding, and of an increasing number of proxy groups, but Israel's invasion was the trigger. Backing nations, and paramilitary groups is pretty common: see U.S backing Ukraine regular army, and private mercenaries.
Oil is the last remaining 'strategic commodity' everyone (including China) needs to keep a balance of power.
Many people missing the actual game here.
How is that not casus belli?
It really depends where in the world you are. There are places that will begin rationing in the next few weeks if not sooner.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/9/bangladesh-shuts-uni...
There was also the hostage crisis but that was done by student protestors rather than the Iranian government.
I somewhat understand Israel's agenda and objective, even if evil and selfish depending on the point of view (or selfish, for Netanyahu to avoid legal scrutiny while acting as prime minister).
I don't understand the USA attacking here at all. With rising prices I think Trump should pay compensation to the rest of the world for his decision here. This is now similar to the build-up to Vietnam though - I don't see Trump being able to withdraw, without looking incompetent, so he is now committed to the war, similar to why Putin can not stop his invasion of Ukraine. Two criminals, one thought.
Every military action will have an on-paper "justification". It's kind of irrelevant frankly. But to cut bullshit, it really isn't that complicated.
Venezuela is an extremely oil rich country. Countries in the middle-east region, including Iran are very oil rich.
And that's in large part why US (by this point firmly decaying petrostate propped by petrodollar) is constantly there "meddling" and ensuring all the oil is continuously bought using US dollars.
That is wholly sufficient to explain things.
Every other cartoonish-evil justification "Iran wants to build nukes to bomb US, etc" is largely bullshit (why, for example, Iran doesn't want to nuke.... say Germany or France? hmmm.....)
Just add Saudi Arabia / Iran Sunni-Shia hatred and you've got war.
Do you want to give odds to your proposition that this is going to turn around in the IRGC's favor?
Hitting ground targets is even less of a technical flex.
1) Stay in power. They really were pretty destabilized before this. This war may actually be propping up their government because hitting a bully, despite what the movies say, just gives them more power. Reporting from inside the country is sparse, but it seems like the few stories coming out aren't showing the same level of internal unrest that was there a month ago. This objective seems on track.
2) Increase their influence in the region. This is likely happening by the minute mainly by the fact that the US is losing influence in the region the longer this goes on. The US's loss is Iran's gain. I suspect that actual negotiations are happening in secret between Iran and gulf nations that will have long term consequences. I don't know that this objective is on track, it will take years to see, but if I were betting long term I would bet that Iran in 5-10 years will have much more influence in the region than they had a month ago.
3) Harm the US and Israel. Spain is getting almost hostile and we have a lot of US assets there. Pretty much every country on the planet is turning their back on the US openly. The most 'help' the US has gotten is basing from the UK and, of course, gulf nations supporting strikes. Israel is going to loose military aid for decades and potentially more after this administration leaves. This objective seems on track too.
I honestly don't know how Iran could get a better outcome than what is happening right now. By the end of this they will look rational compared to the US, the rhetoric of the last 50 years will look vindicated giving them increased influence and access in the region and a new generation of extremists will have been created. This has the makings of becoming one of the worst blunders in military history.
> custom software
Are you referring to screen recordings they've released?
CENTCOM has turned out to be about as honest as the Russian or Ukrainian MoD. They flat-out lied about this shootdown all while sending out search teams. There is some circumstantial evidence that two Blackhawks were damaged trying to run search and rescue operations. There are also stories coming out that they are using bureaucracy to hide massive numbers of casualties.
It’s been fascinating to see my Father (Marine and Army veteran) and my brother (soon be a commissioned Air Force officer) who usually are very aligned politically start develop the first rift I’ve ever seen regarding this war.
Source is the Gulf War Airpower Survey, page 184 (PDF page 205): https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA273996.pdf
And maybe they do have some kind of radars?
Excuse us of being unsympathetic to the greatest state sponser of terrorism in history.
The Muslim country all other Muslim countries love to hate.
The only real theocracy left in the world.
Wannabe North Korea.
The country that killed 30,000 progressive protestors in a few days.
"The country that killed 30,000 progressive protestors in a few days."
Ya, if you believe this you're poorly informed. Where does this number come from? Who sourced it? What is their relationship to Western powers? How are they able to count so many Iranians dying in dungeons so well? How about the logistics of killing 30 000 people?
BS American propaganda. Kuwaiti babies redux.
Iranian progressives have one thing that unites them: they remember that the CIA deposed the only democratically elected, progressive, president and installed a brutally repressive "Shah". [1]
"The only real theocracy left in the world."
That would have to include Israel, an apartheid state along religious lines where the Chief Rabbinate decides who can get married.
"the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in history."
Not according to the State Department; Iran and proxies don't crack the top 10. Sunnis (ISIS, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc) loath Shia and are not coordinated by Iran.
"The Muslim country all other Muslim countries love to hate."
Nope, only Sunni Gulf states hate Iran. Mostly because their rulers are colonial mandarins; the best example is Bahrain, a majority Shia population ruled by foreign Sunni elite installed by the UK 100 years ago. The native Bahrainis loath their rulers.
"Wannabe North Korea."
Say what you will about N. Korea, it isn't getting attacked though.
[1] Shah in quotes because, as a monarchist myself, the deposed, CIA installed, Pahvali was the son of a deposed peasant and the father of a traitor (something, to be fair, the other two Pahlavis weren't).
We live in completely different realities.
>Where does this number come from?
The Iranian Ministry of Health lol
> logistics of killing 30,000 people?
Guns
> apartheid state
Arab citizens of Israel have full rights. Unless you deny Palestinian statehood.
> Chief Rabbinate decides who can get married.
Only if Jewish.
> Don't crack the top ten
"Currently there are four countries designated under these authorities: Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Iran, and Syria."
https://www.state.gov/state-sponsors-of-terrorism
Syria and cuba should no longer count as they've collapsed
Nope all Sunni dislike them
It stands peculiar this post wasn't flagged and removed as "politics".
I was being sarcastic, even if another F-35 was shot, why should it go through the strict guidelines.
The F-35 was developed because the US didn't want to export the F-22 tech to other countries.
As an added benefit, enlisted air crew have no restrictions on mustache length or on professional wear of the uniform.
The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.
By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.
Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.
https://www.news18.com/world/weeks-away-by-next-spring-video...
6 months?
Try like 35+ years. Bibi has been pushing the "Iran is 2 weeks away from a nuke" narrative since the late 80s.
That Iran was on the verge of building bombs was far from clear. Khameini had previously issued a fatwa against doing so, on the grounds that it would be haram, or un-Islamic. All signs suggest that the IRGC was operating in full compliance with that fatwa.
I'm sure the remnants of his administration regret that now.
Iran also restricted IAEA access to military sites while the agreement was in effect.
https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/revealed-emptying-of-th...
That would be an insult to fourth graders IMO, my son happens to be one.
Trump ripped up the monitoring agreement - that was unquestionably stupid.
He attacked Iran during talks to get that back on track .. that was unbelievably stupid (see: current world state).
Had he agreed to have in country monitoring again and had the USofA simply waited it was probable the old hard line core would have withered in time.
That's certainly not on the table now, the fanatics are dug in and feel fully justified. On both sides.
Incapable of The Deal.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
They had high mobility SAMs for the entire war, with nothing to show for it. Something else must have happened there.
> They had high mobility SAMs for the entire war, with nothing to show for it.
This is certainly something to show for it. Iran's air defenses are not like Israel's or Qatar's, they don't have the money or security to build expensive anti-ballistic layers for air defense. These smaller, road-mobile systems are intended to exploit an overextending enemy, and for that purpose they're apparently working quite well.
Like yes, goverment put in by america wont be hostile to america. But its opponents will blame america for that goverment, because well, they are to blamr. And also, once it fails, all the suppressed anger goes out. And some more, because now america is well positioned to be generic scapegoat even for stuff it had not done.
also I would argue that we should not confuse Iran and the islamists ruling the country. as a reminder the Iranian people suffered thousands if not tens of thousands death recently during violent repression of social unrest. so it seems the Iranian people may disagree with the choices of the people in power. at least until the US joined the israel led war crimes against Iran.
Now they even lie about it being a war, while they claim they have already won the war, that isn’t a war.
I wish I was joking.
It is a disease of the Western mind - and particularly Western academia - to deny agency to others, especially people in the Middle East, as you're doing here with your painfully unsubtle attempt to link US support for the Pahlavis in 1956 to the 1979 Islamic Revolution 23 years later. Worth noting that the Pahlavi dynasty started out as autocratic as it ended, well before the US ever showed up.
This is a lazy reverse Orientalism, where people in the Middle East are othered and cast as a perennial victim incapable of taking any role in, or responsibility for, what happens in their own countries. It's disempowering racism in academic garb.
Iranians caused the Islamic Revolution and only the Iranians can undo it. I wish them the best of luck in doing so.
Lots of flights, maintenance resources stretched thin, old aircraft - this is when you'd expect to see crashes.
Military airplanes do crash, there are lots of crashes every year: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2025/11/military-aircraft...
At war there's a lot more pressure on ground and air crews that can lead to more mistakes. Also the mission would be flown closer to the limits vs. training.
So... We don't know? If your question is whether that's a good guess/greater than zero probability then sure. Is it a certainty? No. The Iranians will claim they shot it down. The Americans may or may not admit and if they deny then people will say they're lying.
These people are professionals, they go to school to study REDFOR tactics and get court-martialed when their missions go sideways. They are not looking at the SEAD situation of southern Iran with uncertainty as to how this happened. You are the only one that has voiced that confusion.
“Support”. Hah. The word you’re ham-fistedly avoiding there is “coup”. You got the year wrong as well. The US and UK self-admittedly engineered it to support their national interests.
If you believe not one but two superpowers can’t engineer a coup in a financially poor but resource rich nation then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Why stop there? France engineered and supported an anti-British coup in the underdeveloped but resource rich American colonies in the late 18th century, setting in motion the train of events that led to the Islamic Revolution!
And the Polish General Kosciusko fought valiantly for the Americans, on account of the partitions of Poland. Were it not for those partitions, he'd have been at home! So it is the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian Empires - the partitioning powers of 18th century Poland-Lithuania - to blame for the Islamic Revolution!
But why did Austria desire to get involved in the partitions of Poland, and what long game was it playing vis-a-vis the Shiite scholars of then-Persia...
Hold up, we need a corkboard and some pins. Where's Pepe Silvia in all of this? Who has the Jack Ruby?
You can draw the bowstring all the way to Mars if you want to, but the only people to blame for the monstrous regime of Iran are the people who put that regime in place, and that certainly wasn't the Americans. No amount of "well this encouraged that, which caused blowback to this, leading to that" Substack-level motivated reasoning is going to change that fact.
The gay kids being executed by Iran are not cursing the name of America, or Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, they're cursing the ghouls who are hanging them, who are their countrymen.
Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.
Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.
https://www.twz.com/air/how-the-houthis-rickety-air-defenses...
In short, it took 2 rare events to occur for it to happen.
Btw, Iran with conventional missiles struck its Arab neighbors.
After Trump leaves office the next President will still hate Iran irregardless of political party.
Iran is disliked by all their Arab neighbors besides Qatar.
Is NK really a success? Are they doing well? You plan to hedge long run the world needs another poorly developed pariah state with 90 million people doing suboptimal?
Iranian leadership was fine btw dying for Martyrdom. So let’s give a strongly theological government happy with Martyrdom a nuke. Because they won’t care about the consequences.
You might know technology but you are clueless about the world. Every Iranian not in Iran hates Iran.
Also, remember that it was the US who declared “no quarter”, not the Iranians.
Yep
> The parent generalized
Yep
It's not that the deaths are more valuable, it's that those are the civilian deaths the United States is most-culpable for.
Russian army can stop the invasion any time they decide and individual men who are there were hired as aggressors.
And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.
I mention this because:
1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.
2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)
3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/hegseth-no-quarter-interna...
But, even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, this is clearly very bad for US soldiers (and sailors, airmen, etc). I wonder if they see that.
"In 2024’s The War on Warriors, Hegseth argues at length that US forces should ignore the Geneva conventions and other elements of international law governing the conduct of war."
“'What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us?” he asks. “Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: if you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.'”
He wrote a book in which he openly advocates for war crimes. Maybe, just maybe, it pays to believe him.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/25/pete-hegseth...
> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.
> Our response? We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.
March 13, 2026
(slop has been around longer than LLMs)
This was a sneak attack outside of an established war zone, for an illegal war, so don’t try to conflate this as an attack on America’s enemies. The USA made them their enemies themselves.
>Established in May 2017 and funded by Saudi Arabia,[1][2][3][4][5][6] it actively promotes former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi as the next ruler of Iran.
For perspective: Patriot missiles cost $4m each.
Attrition compared to US materiel(not material - although that too greatly burdens cost to the US) depletion such as the aforementioned Patriot does not favor the US for sustained operations in theater(let alone should a second theater contingency operation occur).
As for the $40m number: I also saw this number, but I don't think it's correct. E.g. Germany recently bought 140 of them for $165m. Ref: https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/defense/1649255166-ger...
You don't sacrifice pilots, ever.
Someone said maybe a form of DIRCM
Flak spreads the damage better and does more kinetic damage than trying to ram a plane with a missile and hoping the concussion from a the resulting explosion damages something.
— pretty much all AA munition works by exploding in close proximity to the target and showering it in shrapnel. So this might even have "helped" the missle/shell against malfunction in its fuse. And considering that this is designed to work like that, and it's likely not the greatest quality work on the Iranian side, it's also possible that the thing is already exploding and just ejected some piece of intentional shrapnel (or unintentionally itself) early, ahead of the actual detonation.
Or the Iranians edited that "dash" into that one frame, it's not exactly like it's a reputable source and it's in their interest to confuse things. Maybe they want the US to believe that the countermeasures are malfunctioning and helping their attacks, so they turn it off…
The single exhaust plume does become multiple on the F35 suggesting damage
They limped it back home, they didn’t ditch a very sensitive airframe over enemy territory, I’d call that a win and the pilot deserves a medal for that.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Even if you dismiss the idea of international standards, a no-quarter declaration is against _US law_, specifically subject to the penalty of death with no other lawful penalty defined: https://www.govregs.com/uscode/title18_partI_chapter118_sect....
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.
Ukraine is doing its best to minimise Russian oil exports, and that's certainly having an effect.
But strategically, Russia is a huge beneficiary of this mess.
1. Russia (as you say): I think this war of choice virtually guarantees a settlement of the Ukraine war along the current borders. At some point Europe will need to ease their energy crisis with Russian oil and gas. Well done, everybody, the system works;
2. Europe: like the GCC they are finding US security guarantees and the NATO protection racket aren't what they were sold. Pax Americana was an illusion. I've elsewhere predicted this is going to lead to arms and tech nationalism within Europe. It's actually a race between fascism taking over Europe and Europe divorcing itself from the US and I suspect fascism is currently winning; and
3. China: the biggest wineer of all this. China is still receiving Iranian oil exports. In fact, the US "punished" Iran by lifting oil sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil to China at market rates instead of below market (because of the sanctions). Again, well done, everybody; and
4. Asia: this has exposed their weakness of imported oil, particularly Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I would not be surprised if this war of choice is the turning point that leads to a China-cenetered Asian security compact.
In one year, the US has essentially torn up the entire post-1945 rules-based international order, which it designed for its own benefit.
Saudi and the UAE don't want the pre-war status quo, they want America to bomb Iran back to the stone age so it can't continue missile or launcher production.
Now that a war is started it has to be finished or the GCC is left far worse off with Iran in a much stronger strategic position in the region despite a decimated military.
Iran ("the regime") was never a good faith actor or negotiator. Their position was something like "we won't develop nuclear weapons as long as we have free reign to torture our own citizens and fund violent groups that destabilize regional governments". And still marched on enriching uranium anyway.
There's nothing to trust on either side. This war was eventually going to happen, I'm just disappointed that it happened under such incompetent leadership in the US.
This is unfortunately the best possible outcome. Nuclear weapons have been around for 80 years now. They are quite achievable by modern states, and they are obviously the only path to sovereignty. Ukraine, North Korea, and Iran have affirmed it.
Bombing a country in pursuit only reaffirms this logic, especially after agreements have already been made or negotiations are under way.
The only path forward, for Iran and everyone else, has been established and stable since ~1945: give people major concessions in exchange for the major concession that they will not try to achieve true sovereignty via nuclear weapons.
Every attempt to bomb or coerce someone off of the nuclear trajectory just increases the motivation (globally) to pursue it with more vigor and more secrecy.
We're on this tightrope until we fall off it, no other options.
Most countries in the region torture their citizens, even Israel except it's Palestinians, because it's a racist apartheid state.
Let's not pretend we care about funding terrorists when it's the US that has the biggest supporter of terrorism in the last 70 years.
The one country 'destabilizing the region' is not Iran.
Frankly, it's hubris all the way down. Kalief Browder.
Who will trust US treaties going forward?
Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war (eg [2][3][4]). They just oppose the way it was initiated. In other words, they have a process objection not a policy objection.
I've seen lamenting over Harris losing the elction (as well as more than a few doing "stolen election") about how the world could be different. But US foreign policy is uniparty
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/8/kamala-harris-says-...
[3]: https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/lea...
[4]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/hakeem-jeffries-wo...
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
It shouldn't. The responsible course going forward is a constitutional convention and the dissolution of the United States.
Who trusted them before?
You saw the same pattern where Ukraine and Russia both constantly adapted on the battlefield and the war changed rapidly over the first year.
Radar is line-of-sight. A non-stealth fighter flying just above the treetops can only be detected if it gets within a few miles of a SAM radar. This is true to the point that the radar lock range for something like an F-35 is about the same as a non-stealth jet flying super-low (though the hit probability is lower for the F-35 if it's flying at high altitude as it has more room to detect the launch and maneuver).
The problem is that CENTCOM is actively lying to us. After this shootdown, they denied it happened while launching search and rescue operations only admitting to the facts after Iran released the evidence. The same thing happened with the F-35. CENTCOM said it landed safely, but were simultaneously sending an Chinook to run search patterns in the area. This could also mean that the alleged Kuwaiti pilot that supposedly took out 3 of our F-15 was also a lie.
Finally, with so many non-stealth planes getting shot down and stealth allegedly working great, why are we using so many stand-off munitions still and why aren't we using F-35 more?
All the shootdowns have been shown with a custom software showing an IR view and the successful missiles seem to be using electro-optical tracking. The IRST is passive and doesn't trigger sensors plus isn't stopped by our radar stealth. At the same time, a human operator means stuff like flares don't work anywhere near as well. Even more scary, these human-guided runs are premium training material for China to train AI-guided missiles.
My conclusion is that stealth is no longer the game-changer it was once though to be (if it ever was).
https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-used-shahed-drone-arme...
The reality is avoiding a ground operation was probably the wrong move at this point (ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not)
It's really hard to truly guarantee surface to air capabilities are gone when you're relying purely on sat images + aerial surveillance (and obviously this carries risk). Iran has fairly portable SAM systems that are public knowledge.
Let’s put it this way: if we where to stack rank all the countries that where directly involved in the creation of the modern Iranian regime, Iran would be first and America would be second.
This isn’t some theory, it’s a pretty clear/succinct cause and effect.
It’s not clever, patriotic or even a good take to ignore that and hide behind “well it’s their fault for having a regime change orchestrated by us that installed an unpopular authoritarian monarch who curtained freedoms because he would oppose Russian interests and support western ones, ultimately leading to someone worse taking power after decades of human rights abuse supported by the west in return for continued alignment”.
Yes, ultimately the person who pulls the trigger is responsible, but the person who gave them the gun and told them where to shoot is also responsible.
The thing is, it's very easy to get caught up in this kind of rhetoric and lose a lot of perspective. This is the kind of logical chain that leads people to end up deciding that Germany had "legitimate grievances" about the Treaty of Versailles and end up in some pretty dark places. Not saying that's you in the slightest, just noting the problems with that rhetorical style. It's fast, somewhat lazy, and greatly lacking in perspective.
If there's something I think we can agree on, the US role in '53 (corrected date) is nothing to be proud of, any more than *points generally towards the Strait of Hormuz* whatever the hell this is.
I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.
How spicy of a debate is that really? How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54454-most-americans-oppos...
https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro...
Clearly this war isn't popular but that's a far cry from saying there's no debate. Like many other topics/questions we're seeing people following their tribe and bubbles rather than actual debating.
Then again.. I can no longer can rely on those surveys in any meaningful way.
> How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.
in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).
So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available
Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/world/middleeast/iran-str...
not just what i quoted, but your source does not say any of what you are saying.
your source says: Satellite images show damage near vital equipment on sites in at least five countries https://archive.ph/QHNXW
Iron Dome’s primary fire-control radar is the Israeli EL/M-2084 Multi-Mission Radar, not the USA’s AN/FPS-132
Some analysts are sure drumming up the severity [0]. In the fog of war, it is hard to tell what's exaggerated and what's not. The proposal by the current US Admin to increase defence spending by 40% to $1.5t is not a welcome sign for those opposed to heavy spending, for any number of reasons.
[0] https://shanakaanslemperera.substack.com/p/the-last-molecule... / https://archive.vn/5H0L5
Iron dome has nothing to do with that systems.
hence the first department that goes into full throttle mode in any war - is the department of propaganda | press corps (as modernly called).
so we gonna see lies on both sides - Iranians | US / Israel. with the truth in between.
So maybe not blind? but also, hard to verify.
Look bro, if we can make SR-71s out of pizza ovens, I'm pretty sure somewhere in the CIA can scrounge up a few ounces of gadoluminium. Tankie dreams are placation for those who wait for somebody else to make the birdseed fall from the sky.
I really hope that Israeli and Iranian governments both go to hell. May both destroy each other.
Available on aliexpress - but has longer shipping times and of course those tariffs, that you don't have to pay, that you have to pay.
Which is specified as a strategy in the doctrine of the airforce.
"Keep in mind that the greatest entities, whether they are cities or nations, are the ones most susceptible to the pride that comes before a fall."
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Doesn't include any 256 channel multi spectral radiometric data from ground level crystal packs though ... I guess they didn't show much of interest in the gamma spectrum.
And, more importantly, the real-life events on which it's based?
Rescue team for the rescue team.
Just for a quick laugh, look at the official (Iranian) president's letter to the American people published yesterday [2]. The font changes between the paragraphs!
[1] https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/116339631989805542
[2] https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2039418009052119190?s=20
That's when the shootdown happened, yes.
> Iran tweets about taking down an American jet basically daily.
Sure. We have two sets of demonstrable liars here. See, for example, the E-3 Sentry that got blown up; it took leaked photos for that to be admitted.
And don't get me started on the several times in the last few months we've "obliterated" Iran's nuclear capacity and missiles and whatnot only to be told it's time to do it again.
[1] 31.941606, 50.311765
Maybe I agree with you that the US, in 1953, planted the seeds for this situation. If I could punish the people responsible I would, but they're all dead now. Also, doesn't our historic involvement give us some moral obligation to fix it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50382219 "The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found uranium particles at a site in Iran that had not been declared by the Iranian authorities.
A confidential report, seen by the BBC, did not say exactly where the site was. But inspectors are believed to have taken samples from a location in Tehran's Turquzabad district.
That is the area where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse". "
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-iaea-found-u...
"VIENNA (Reuters) - Samples taken by the U.N. nuclear watchdog at what Israel's prime minister called a "secret atomic warehouse" in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain, two diplomats who follow the agency's inspections work closely say."
...
"Those traces were, however, of uranium, the diplomats said - the same element Iran is enriching and one of only two fissile elements with which one can make the core of a nuclear bomb. One diplomat said the uranium was not highly enriched, meaning it was not purified to a level anywhere close to that needed for weapons. "There are lots of possible explanations," that diplomat said. But since Iran has not yet given any to the IAEA it is hard to verify the particles' origin, and it is also not clear whether the traces are remnants of material or activities that predate the landmark 2015 deal or more recent, diplomats say."
Bibi and his tales that Iran is just a week away from an actual working bomb has been going on almost as long. Bibi - the guy with a secret / not secret collection of bombs.
The question of whether or not Iran was playing along sufficiently with inspectors when there was an inspection deal in place is what we are talking about here.
IMHO they weren't getting away with much, at that time Israel was making up claims that they were and media blasting.
That is all times past, of course.
It's also clear that once Trump tore up the deal they went (sensibly in light of everything it seems) back to unchecked enrichment, and now that they've been attacked during negotiations there's zero trust and it would seem certain that there is a real risk that reinvigorated hard core fanatics will set a bomb off in either Israel and / or the US.
Smooth move clowns.
It's difficult to squeeze stories out of him, mostly because it was so long ago and ancient history to him. Just to put his timeline in perspective, after the war he befriended a captain of the White Russian Navy who had to flee after losing the Russian Revolution. Alot of White Russians ended up in San Francisco, which is where my neighbor settled down in the '60s. He was also a military escort for Nelson Rockefeller, I think during one Rockefeller's campaigns. Once a staunch Republican, needless to say he's not a fan of where the Republican Party has ended up since then. Still a gung-ho Marine, though, who keeps insisting on climbing over our 10-foot fence whenever he locks himself out of his house, which means I have to jump the fence. Were it anyone else I'd just call and pay for a locksmith myself, or badger him to finally give me copies of his keys.
Though if Iranian air defenses are capable of shooting down an F-15, mounting a rescue operation with a C-130 may not be the brightest idea.
Anyone know the minimum speed of a B-2?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...
I saw some people leaving a known drug house yesterday, but fortunately I gunned down the whole family, no questions asked!
So something doesn't add up in what your references are saying. What is your explanation of the discrepancy?
https://www.sipri.org/commentary/essay/2021/why-iran-produci...
https://armscontrolcenter.org/irans-stockpile-of-highly-enri...
As I recall, they did remain in compliance for another year after that, given that it was originally supposed to be a multilateral agreement. But IMHO they should have put everything they had into refinement and weapons production as soon as Trump unilaterally ripped up the agreement. Instead they held back, and they are now seeing the result of that mistake.
None of this would be happening if Iran had actually done what Israel assured us they were doing.
The JCPOA would have expired in 2025 anyways assuming that they even meant to observe it in the first place.
Your last statement isn't as solid as you think it is. Iran hasn't gotten to a point where they have nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles not because they didn't want to but because they were unable to get to that or were concerned that getting closer would invite the same attack we're seeing today.
I don't have the expertise to know what use its for, but I suspect the agencies assesment was informed bybthe knowledge of 60% enriched uranium.
It's used for subs btw and maybe they felt they needed a nuclear one to secure Hormuz.
Got it genius. But hey, by the trust you put in Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard we already knew you were a genius. Didn't need the additional observation about Iran building 100 nuclear submarines to secure Hormuz.
The best shot would be to turn them over to the ICC
This is not true.
OLC opinions are just that: opinions. They are non-binding and non-promissory. They are an important factor in any assessments as a norm, but definitely not dispositive and not legally binding.
The only real barrier is the pardon power, but I'm personally fine at this point with totally breaking the seal, trying and jailing every criminal in the administration(++), and consider the pardon power gone for good. Small price to pay.
Where is the check or balance on this? The executive branch can apparently just launder itself wholesale of any crimes committed by its members.
this sounds like the kind of rules we, as a society, decided to dispense with, so the DOJ can absolutely turn around.
This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.
Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.
It doesn't really matter what happens internally in the US now, everyone realizes that every four years the world will roll the dice.
Most emphatically yes. We've seen occasional bursts of spirited dissent but that's about it. As far as sustained opposition, it still seems that they're hoping to just wait out the clock for things to go back to "normal".
> But US foreign policy is uniparty
No, I'd say even with this senseless "war" the "uniparty" model has still become invalid with Trump. While the US fear industry ("news media") has been beating the drums against Iran for quite some time, the US military/intelligence community has resisted attacking. If we had a President Harris, I would bet that we would not be attacking Iran, especially in this manner - not because of Harris herself, but rather because she wouldn't have gutted the domain experts who come up with reality-based plans, and who have presumably been saying "If we overtly attack Iran they close the Strait and actually end up stronger".
I like to refer to that system as bureaucratic authoritarianism - no meaningful checks on government power itself, but there are checks on how it's exercised. The critical difference is that Trumpism is autocratic authoritarianism (especially the second round after he broke so many laws the first time without consequence) - the experts and other group-project stakeholders (eg Inspectors General) were all fired (or at the very least sidelined), and replaced with glaringly incompetent yes-men who execute any simplistic "plan" regardless how bad it is.
Democrats in Congress are currently almost universally opposed to the War in Iran. As the minority party they are unable to stop it unilaterally. Budget obstructions are the single lever available to them and given other issues like ICE, healthcare cuts, federal layoffs, can’t be used for every issue, every time without diffusing that very limited power into irrelevance.
Talk about “controlled opposition” given the blatantly obvious differences between the last two administrations is a signal of either being uninformed or a deliberate demotivational strategy.
Here are recent quotes from Schumer/Jefferies/Harris that for some reason you selectively chose not to include:
"Trump’s actions in Iran will be considered one of the greatest policy blunders in the history of our country," - Chuck Schumer
“The American people are sick and tired of the chaos, high costs and extreme Republican agenda. Donald Trump must end his reckless war of choice in the Middle East. Now.” - Hakeem Jefferies
“In the last 48 hours Donald Trump has dragged America into a war that we don’t want” - Kamala Harris
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chuck-schumer-hakeem-jeffries-more-024256513.html?guccounter=1
Shoulder launched missiles are absolutely capable of taking down large slow aircrafts in 2026.
This is not a rpg from 1930
While true, I think it's more correct to say that the determining factor is which television news media people most readily consume.
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
Understandable
This is not a binary situation, and a lucky F-15 kill would not make it a good idea to concentrate more assets in an area where the US will now focus more resources.
I think this war is actually pushing many away from fascism. Trump was the reference for a lot of the European right and this is showing people he was terrible and, by extension, embarrassing them all.
Heck, Orbán is currently running an electoral campaign as "the candidate of peace".
And they still don't see the point of EVs.
Those short-sighted people are the ones cheering for fascism, so the current events have no impact on their vote.
But I know one thing: we re going to see a rush into implementing renewables after this that will look like a post-war policy. What is also bad news for he GCC.
One coulld argue that it happened earlier, for example after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, or after the annexation of East Germany.
I've found that most of our population has almost no connection to the people that actually fight wars, and therefore have no idea what they think. With the exception of a few criminals, none of us desire to commit war crimes. None of us want to send rounds into civilian infrastructure, seeing regular people struggle to get food, fuel, and water in Iraq did not make me feel powerful and it was obvious it did not advance our goals on the ground.
The jingoistic commentary people hear from politicians and former military podcasters that don't fight anymore is repugnant, and this backsliding in the (at least attempt at) honorable execution of war is not going to bode well for our country. It's probably trite when we're double tapping girl's schools, but I want to think that purposely striking civilian infrastructure, universities, hospitals, water resources... this was all something "we" didn't do.
This is actively devaluing the meaning of being a Marine. Maybe this already happened in Mai Lai, maybe this was further chipped away by Abu Ghraib, maybe letting Eddie Gallagher off... etc etc. But this feels different in a way I've never felt before.
I absolutely believe you when you say that none of y'all want to commit war crimes, fire on civilian infra, bomb schools, etc. And yet that's happening right now, in Iran, and the soldiers continue to follow orders and carry out this travesty. I get that refusing an order is not something any soldier will do lightly, but when a school gets hit in Iran, do the soldiers conducting that strike not know what they're attacking beforehand?
Even if they don't, do they never find out? Do they not see that some large N% of targets that have been hit have ended up being civilian targets? When they're ordered to fire on a new target, do they not question whether or not it's a civilian target, given past history?
I ask these questions from near-complete ignorance; I really do not know how this works, or what kind of information any officer or soldier has when they're about to follow the orders they've been given. But it just seems insane to me that people continue to follow these orders, assuming they know how many civilians have been killed through previous actions. I just cannot imagine being in their position, and actually trusting that my superior officers were ordering me to do things that will later turn out to be morally defensible. (If any of this war is morally defensible, which I don't think it is.)
I'm going to bet that pilots aren't briefed to hit a school, they get a target package that says this is a legit target, an IRGC command post or something. There are multiple layers of detachment between the person picking coordinates, entering them into a JDAM, and the pilot releasing that weapon so who is ultimately responsible (and this is by design, everyone can tell themselves a story right now to sleep at night.)
But you do know what you hit, in the version of the military that I was in there would have been a detailed investigation into the chain of failures that led to striking a school with children in it. I'm sure it weighs heavily on the every person involved in that decision. Cold comfort for the parents of those kids, but something like that leaves a life long scar on the people responsible.
We want them to. At the same time that we sit at our keyboards and philosophize about how soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders, we [collectively] do not really want them spending all that much time pondering it. The most obvious cases, sure, but in general we want them to do what they are told, and do it quickly. That is why there are lawyers in the field to make fast judgements.
The better solution is to try and not routinely find ourselves in the position of the country being led by criminals.
What's different this time is that they haven't bothered with the PR.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
This is just stupid, you cannot “fight to win” if you don't have a theory of victory.
And if you adopt Russian doctrines all you'll end up with is Russian military efficiency.
I'm not sure why any of this is relevant. The question I was responding to was about why A-10s are even in-theatre, given there's no boots on the ground yet.
The answer to that question is "they're probably doing SEAD". They might also be there to hit Iranian naval drones, though I doubt it'd be effective in that role.
Most competent governments don't say things that are outright wrong. They may use double speak, or not comment on a topic. But this government (and unfortunately it's this specific adminstration/president) has acted time and again in a way that both of us know very well.
It is not a conspiracy theory if it's true.
And no, it's not "cynicism Olympics", it's observation.
truths from different angles that are at odds with one another produce mistrust and thoughts of conspiracy. We have more of that now than we have ever had, ever. It doesn't take Nostradamus to point to the trend.
tl;dr : Gee, where did this mistrust in the current government come from? I'd point but I don't have that many hands.
I lived in Israel during that war and everyone had gas masks and people were truly worried about chemical weapons being used. They weren't.
But in Iran there really are/were centrifuges and enriched Uranium. Remember: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet ?
Iran admits having this Uranium: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/9/iran-suggests-it-cou...
So which part is fabricated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_program_of_Iran
"By the early 2000s, two key clandestine facilities were nearing completion: a uranium enrichment center at Natanz (in central Iran), built to house thousands of centrifuges, and a heavy water production plant alongside a 40 MW heavy-water reactor (IR-40) near Arak. These facilities, which had been kept secret from the IAEA, were intended for ostensibly civilian purposes but had clear weapons potential. Enrichment at Natanz could yield high-enriched uranium for bombs, while the Arak reactor (once operational) could produce plutonium in its spent fuel, and the heavy water plant would supply the reactor's coolant.[41] In August 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), exposed the existence of Natanz and Arak.[41] Satellite imagery soon confirmed construction at these sites. The revelation that Iran had built major nuclear facilities in secret, without required disclosure to the IAEA, ignited an international crisis and raised questions about the program's true aim.[41]"
People who are pro the Iranian regime claim that there was a religious order against building nuclear weapons. But at the same time there is no other explanation as to why Iran would enrich Uranium to 60% as that has virtually no other use. It also seems they were working on other components related to weaponiztion (though admittedly we have less confirmation/visibility into that). Ofcourse the precise timing of when they would chose to build those weapons and their intent is not that easy to guess but it's also not unreasonable to assume they would do so when they felt it would be to their advantage.
No one here is "pro the Iranian regime." Do better.
Wow, I can't believe someone would say this. In January, they basically killed tens of thousands of us with machine guns. After the war, the first thing they did was cut off the internet to prevent an internal uprising. They deployed many Basij checkpoints with machine guns just to warn Iranians. This is a sample scene, don't you consider it torture?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/video/2026/01/12/ira...
The world is pretty small these days. Mass murderers are everyone's business. It's morally offensive to just say "well that's a long ways away, not my problem".
On top of all that, they've threatened to reduce the entire country to the "stone age", and have started to target civilian industries.[0] If this campaign continues, how is this anything less than mass murder?
They're not doing this war for the reason you seem to want. They're not doing this to save Iranians.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-shifts-to-hitting-irans...
https://www.en-hrana.org/day-35-of-u-s-and-israeli-attacks-o...
What’s the next country we move to?
In a "rational" world the quagmire of Iran would make such a move unlikely, but with this administration the prospect of an "easy win" could have them just go for it.
After all, nobody's stopping them. The Constitution only remains so that the 2A fanatics can LARP at being patriots.
Probably want to drop the assumptions about it having anything much to do with US interests. Better to start looking at who has had the alliance that contained them damaged and their oil sanctions lifted.
When the history of the American demise as a global superpower gets written, this war and the government behind it, will merit a beefy chapter.
https://www.bostonpoliticalreview.org/post/pete-hegseth-fire...
It's not that hard, the US just didn't want to do it for whatever dumb reason.
Iran spends about 2.5% of its GDP on defense, compared to USA at around 3.5%. How much should they be spending?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat...
I tried to check the amounts normalized for % of GDP.
Conservative estimates put them at half of the 2% GDP military spend. However, the IRGC's tentacles are also estimated to siphon off something like +50% of the GDP.[0]
Not all of that money's going to military hardware, but they have a substantial slush fund and use the Iranian resource base as a military piggy bank.
[0]https://fortune.com/2026/03/02/iran-islamic-revolutionary-gu...
Expand on this logic please.
European countries are protected by NATO and a nuclear umbrella.
Why would you expect a nation state to not invest in its military?
"Good sign" of what, though? Air superiority? I guess, sure. But we've constructed a strategic situation for ourselves where mere air superiority is losing.
The straight remains closed. Because let's be blunt: if we can't reliably fly a F-15E or A-10 in the region, there's no way an oil company is going to bet its crew and cargo.
Honestly the best situation here is that Iran merely decides to toll the straight. That's "losing" too, but at least one with a merely "large financial overhead" on international energy traffic instead of a disastrous 15% off the top cut in capacity.
Iran is winning. This is the difference between tactics and strategy.
It's uncomfortable to admit given the context, but the truth is that the Islamic Republic of Iran really is a terrible state, both to its own people and its neighbors, and a much wealthier Iran represents a genuine threat to world peace on its own.
[1] To wit: "This is Our Water now. Pay us what we want. Don't like it? Come bomb us again and see how your oil markets like that. We can take it. You soft infidels can't, and we proved that already. Now it's $4/barrel, btw." Imagine that delivered on Truth Social for more ironic impact. It's Trump bluster, but with actual teeth.
building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people
Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_Iran
And how much is US spending?
>just for this very attack, only to have almost everything obliterated.
The spending was apparently justified.
If you're worried about a state that terrorises the region, best to focus on Israel
Or the Wahabi regime that sponsored the sort of fanaticism that led to the rise of Al Qaeda?
Let's not put a moral spin on America's realpolitik.
Iran was close to achieving that same thing with ballistic missile bombardment of Europe.
The problem is that Iran, unlike NK, is run by a fanatical death cult with stated goal of attacking United States and history of running proxy militias in every nearby failed state, in a neighborhood that has no shortage of failed states.
Why do you believe this? Their recent actions don't seem to back it up.
I guess it makes some amount of sense that information isn't always distributed in huge amounts of detail, outside of the specifics on what they need to do.
I hope that those detailed investigations are still happening.
At least we're not pretending anymore.
I would really love if we could manage that, and soon.
Which reinforces my point?
Which makes them irrelevant here in this discussion but sure yea. Russia (those sneaky guys who invaded Ukraine and are being supplied by Iran) provide targeting information to Iran, Iran has missiles, we can't shoot them all down, and here we are. It's unfortunate but that's what happens in a war. Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
> Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
We can easily afford both, but we choose not to because our political system is full of morons and corruption, but instead of Iran being more like the US and being dysfunctional in this regard, it should be more like Norway (excluding population differences) and pump and sell the oil and do so for the benefit of their citizens instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
> Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits:
Figures provided here are inaccurate and don't account for spending on proxy groups, for example.
This is an interesting take given that the US seems to have ignored many of the most important lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
As for "end up in another war", the language you chose is very revealing. You don't just "end up in...war". Wars don't start themselves. Someone starts them and in the case of the US, it's almost always the US.
> instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
After US and israel bombing them.... again... what do you think, will there be more or less "death to US" chants? Also, considering the number of dead people in iran, lebanon, palestine and other countries, the next step is probably special force work in US... the ones you guys call "terrorists".
Lessons like the value of AWACs. Now we're down to 15 and the availability rate is like 50%. So 8 or so WORLDWIDE. Yeah, that's a good lesson. And we've cancelled its replacement after someone (probably Elon) whispered BS into Trump's ear about space based sensors.
I'm sure China is watching with a notepad out about all these lessons. Thucydides is rolling in his grave.
If you end up in another war.. the coming month? Do you think Trump has had enough? Ans that the coming presidents wont start one?
Turned on a TV lately?
Maybe Israel and the US wouldn't be attacking a country where stepping on US and Israeli flags, chants of death to America and death to Israel, calling Israel little Satan and the US big Satan. Building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and trying to get to a nuclear bomb? (and I mean the list goes on and on).
They need nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles so they can murder with impunity without risk of retribution. A regime that conducts public executions in stadiums, or mows down 10's of thousand of their own citizens who dare to protest, or give people plastic keys to heaven to walk into minefields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_key_to_paradise or beat up woman on the streets to death for not wearing a hijab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini (and this list also goes on and on) can't be allowed to act with impunity.
Burning US flags and calling for death to blacks has been a KKK thing. We did not bomb them collectively, or break their infra, when they got their guns because their expressions were considered free speech. Individual transgressions of law were pursued (once in a while).
So much for the moral high ground.
This is not an administration run by adults who model consequences.
Everything happens to reassure the Commander in Chief - and the people behind him, like Miller and Vought - that they're exceptionally special and gifted people who can have anything they want and do anything they want, to anyone, without limits.
That’s why he uses such language
The blue team carries plenty of blame for not fielding better candidates. If nobody is buying your bullshit, it's a little weak to blame the customer.
And all of the us electorate carries plenty of blame for letting our government get so massive and out of control over time. We've let this beast metastasize and grow, and now were stuck with it.
They are 100% at fault.
As we all know, in this day and age, you need to REALLY sell your story, and have the media behind you. Competence is tertiary.
> Approval of Trump among Republicans has slipped to a second-term low of 84%, down from 92% last March. At the same time, an all-time high 16% of Republicans disapprove. This shift can be attributed, at least in part, to declining support among non-MAGA Republicans, as approval dropped 11 points in the last year among this group (70% in March 2025 to 59% today). Virtually all MAGA Republicans continue to approve of Trump, with 98% approving a year ago and 97% now.
> https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-oppose...
March 20th poll
Honestly it's more than that. Propaganda and lies put out by ALL actors in this conflict. If you want to understand what's going on I think you have the expose yourself to as many competing sources as you can find. And still you're going to end up with a very shoddy picture. The term for this is epistemic collapse.
One of the things I have disliked about the Iranian conflict is that their propaganda/messaging has been, by quite a margin, more reliable than what the US/Israel have been putting out.
I like to think that I live in a free/liberal democratic portion of the world, but seeing the "other side" being more honest really puts a dent in things.
Can you please expand on this with some examples?
Kek. Tell me you live in a bubble without telling me you live in a bubble.
"Both are doing propaganda, but one side's propaganda is totally less propaganda" gave me a good laugh today, thank you
The only thing I think can be said reliably is that this has been going on for weeks, the Strait seems to be more closed than open, Trump is clearly out of his depth and the US is sending more units to the area. All of those point to a serious problem for the US military.
Drones, unlike many other systems produce a lot of kill footage and due to the specific users a lot of that is getting uploaded right now.
Successful sorties get uploaded, unsuccessful ones do not (if only because it's boring media).
No other system does this: artillery and missiles don't, manned systems worry about opsec, etc.
the evidence is Alert system may not even work for missiles, or give very short warning (seconds to 1 minute instead of the usual 10 minutes)
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-03-...
If we are speaking of interception/penetration, these are also solved by Iran using several strategies that Israel/CENTCOM did not expect:
1. use of cluster munitions
2. exhaustion of expensive interceptor inventory (exchanging $7000 shahed drone for $3-5 mln worth of PAC-3 interceptors)
3. Use of penetration aids
4. Changing trajectory at the terminal stage
5. coordinating swarm attacks (let AD to intercept SRBMs, while the real damage is caused by abundant cheap Shaheds that fly too slow and low to be detected)
https://www.csis.org/analysis/unpacking-irans-drone-campaign...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/23/iran-cluster-b...
The Iron Dome does not depend on the American radar system in Qatar that Iran hit. It would be crazy for it to do so when it only targets short range attacks. If someone is telling you that the "Iron Dome is blind" because an American radar in Qatar got hit by a missile, you should probably update the amount you trust that source negatively, since not only is that not true, but it doesn't even pass the sniff test to anyone who knows what the Iron Dome is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Dome
This is not true, Tamir interceptors have been upgraded to target ballistic missiles. It is extremely visible when this happens, as the interceptors fly a very different path than usually.
if you replace "iron dome" with "air defense network" everything else would still be true
that after 4 years of Ukraine war where those tactics have been widely used, in some cases by both sides, and where Russia has even been using the same Iranian drones
In my view, if someone invades your territory and starts attacking you, you have no obligation to follow any sort of "principles" or "rules" when it comes to how you fight back. Anything you need to do to the attackers in order to defend yourself and your people is, by definition, morally defensible.
(Do note that I said "need". Doing arbitrary messed-up things that don't actually further the goal of driving back the attackers is not ok.)
US exceptionalism is a prominent feature of every republican and democratic president since decades.
It's sad, because if US did, and led by example, it could've pulled serious weight internationally on plenty of matters.
Instead it can only do so by economic or military leverage, which, at the end of the day is not enough of a leverage to avoid confrontation.
Iran's use of cluster munitions to attack swaths of Israeli cities is also against the Geneva Convention (though I'd again point out that we started hitting civilian targets in Iran first).
Both sides have violated the conventions, but the US and Israel have violated them to a much greater degree (especially Israel and all their attacks on Lebanese civilians not to mention razing Gaza).
We have to wait and see if Iran is fighting a woke war.
The point is there are a great deal of people, even in the US, who advocate that it is unreasonable to hold people fighting the west in general and US in particular to the Geneva conventions. I don't know where this idea comes from, because morally it is of course indefensible, but there you go.
I would expect the number to be bigger in Iran. I would expect the number among IRGC extremists to be even higher than in Iran in general.
Second: war crimes have 2 interpretations. First as violations of the Rome treaty which require that the state where the warcrimes happen has signed the Rome treaty. Iran hasn't.
The second interpretation of warcrimes is that they are violations of the Geneva conventions, and the reaction would be that the UN security council intervenes. Well, the UNSC has preemptively declared they will not hold Iran to account for warcrimes (to be exact: France, Russia and China have declared they will veto). So at minimum you can say that Iranian warcrimes will not have any "official" consequences.
The world and the UN have decided that warcrimes "don't count". As in there will not be any consequences unless the government of the country where they happened implements those consequences.
Third: Iran has already kidnapped a US civilian (a reporter, Shelly Kittleson) and are holding her hostage. This is already a violation of the Geneva convention. They have also kidnapped hundreds of foreign nationals of other nations and are also holding them for ransom, which is also a violation of human rights, ie. a warcrime.
So those are my three reasons Iran won't hold itself to human rights standards.
Also, I dont see UN punishing Israel or American war crimes either ... so it makes sense to not apply "whatever goes" standard to aggressors and different one to the defender.
Expect there to be a lot of operatives of the US in Iran. Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it wouldn't be the first time a CIA or something operative is caught and this is the cover.
In war the first victim is always the truth
The other unknown is how far the U.S., Isreal, and potentially other countries are willing to go. Turning the lights off and literally sending Iran back to the stone age wouldn't be so difficult at this stage, but would probably rule out the possibility of a deal that sees Iran disarm and hand over the enriched uranium.
Iran had already offered to give up the enriched uranium bit that is off the table now. Iran should and will pursue a nuclear weapon in order to protect themselves from American and Israeli imperialism.
Even Netenyahu has said you can't do regime change without some sort of boots on the ground. Iran is much bigger and more mountainous than Iraq. The IRGC has a couple hundred thousand active personell.
They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.
>They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.
Yes, Ust-Luga and Primorsk. Very successful hits. Painful for Putin. Yet it isn't a knock-down. Russia is like a big drunk guy in a street fight - just delivering painful blows to him doesn't help, you have to deliver a knock-out blow, and unfortunately Ukraine still seems far from it.
>Both countries do the type of attack drone clustering you suggest
Ukraine still isn't completely there. They do attack Russia with up to 200 drones/day. They seem to never cluster more than a few, and the drones they are using are comparably small - 50kg warhead - and slow, 100+ km/h, almost always less than 200km/h. So they are easy to intercept/shoot down, almost never penetrate Moscow air defense, and do noticeable damage only when hitting flammable targets like oil/gas industry related.
Look at how Mamdani didn't even get any backing. Quite the opposite, he was obstructed. And he's 100x more palatable to them than the idea of prosecuting the traitors.
Then sanctions came, no more very cheap wood pulp for the german industry, and after a year of sanctions, the russians built (i think) 4 large paper factories, so even after the sanctions end, that business is not coming back to germany.
The classic mistake here is to consider that dictatorships are like democracies—they aren't, and their power structure is different and more resilient to economic shocks. Even Bachar Al-Assad, who was much weaker, took 13 years to leave power.
At some point, one should question if wide sanctions targeted at increasing the suffering of the civilian population are really worth it.
North Vietnam didn't die of exhaustion, nor did Afghanistan (2x), Iraq.
For reference, it's likely Ukraine is making more medium cheap drones per year than Iran, the current boogeyman.
This war will end the same way, probably around 2030.
WW2 wasn't ended by capturing Berlin, it was ended because the German military was destroyed or surrendered as they were forced back towards Berlin.
By the time it fell, there wasn't an effective German military left.
They were referring to a Sunday before the Markets opened, and right on cue President Trump started making announcements that had a massive effect on market movements
Previously the USA government were downplaying (then retaliatory) Iranian drone attacks on bases in the middle east, claiming zero damage, and laughing at the attackers, the Iranians provided footage that showed real damage, and the US military released statement(s) that agreed with the Iranian claims.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that the Iranian regime is anything but a steaming pile of ew, but the lesson we were supposed to learn from the Vietnam war, and the Iraq war (II), was that hearts and minds are the key to "winning", and that's built on trust, which is built on transparency and honesty.
edit: and the Afghanistan invasion
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/middle-east/full-text-of-...
Vs Trump's speech:
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-transcript-address-i...
IF(highest sacrifice in your cult is dying while trying to kill those who disagree with you because of same) THEN (you are in a death cult)
How does this work out when we are the ones that decided to start the war? Does saying the word "war" suddenly absolve us of the crimes we commit in that war?
You know the one about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on asking for these claims, but you should consider what burden of proof you are asking for: constant political slogans advocating attacks? Or do you need the leader to explicitly state that that's not just a slogan? Forthright statements in their religious texts advocating the same?
And would you expect that level of specificity and forthrightness of other comparable claims?
Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate.
There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Iran needed to be bombed, it took absurd incompetence to start doing so before planning how to handle asymmetric warfare against drones in an affordable way.
Why isn't there a productive debate to be had here?
Your arguing that the incompetence has to do with handling drones. To me that statement feels close to "repeating propaganda" because the Shaed drones are generally handled in an affordable way which is by shooting them with bullets from helicopters: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uZ07pcDGE70
This is a method that has been used for a long time in Ukraine as well: https://www.reddit.com/r/Planes/comments/1qzj19h/an_f16_of_t...
https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/us-apache-pilots-dro...
There are endless videos and news stories about how drones are shot down effectively by the UAE (with AH-64 cannons), by Israel (where Iran doesn't even bother sending drones over because none of them make it), and by Ukraine (including with newer counter-drone tech they have).
The propaganda says "we fire a 2 million dollar THAAD missile on a 50k dollar drone". Many can be shot down cheaply. Some are shot down with $500k AA missiles. We also need to account for anything destroyed on the ground and not launched. So it seems like your opening argument can certainly at the very least be debated.
OTOH it is true that some drones got through and inflicted significant damage. But maybe that's unavoidable to some degree.
Even beyond the base statement. If you think Iran needed to be bombed, e.g. because they were manufacturing 100 long range ballistic missiles per month and because they had enough nuclear material to make 12 bombs and were working on all the technology pieces to be able to put them on ballistic missiles and launch them, then what would be the alternative universe where we somehow magically came up with solutions to the asymmetric nature of this war? Would waiting for them to have a lot more missiles and drones and bury them deeper be a good thing or a bad thing. What would be the odds of the regime either compromising and giving up their abilities or collapsing without external intervention.
People I know (even Iranian expats) were excited to see the regime get hammered and there was hope for possibility of change (and also a little bloodlust)… but I think as the war drags on and the US is exposed to be in an un-winnable mess, sentiment will continue to sour.
This has already started to happen in Nate Silver’s post you linked.
Also worth noting that Nate Silver's measure has been declining for almost 3 weeks, the majority of the duration of the invasion.
Before the invasion, a University of Mariland poll says 55 million and a YouTov poll says 71 million support. These are useful numbers because we know there's a rally around the flag effect that distorts thinking during a conflict.
https://criticalissues.umd.edu/feature/do-americans-favor-at... https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54158-few-americans-suppor...
Essentially, a MESA movement, “Make the Earth Shit Again”.
The obvious implication is that the rest of the world is at war with the US (by various means), and should act accordingly, starting with a wide-ranging consumer boycott of all US products.
The relevant quote:
> Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
> Apparently 37.7% of Americans,
These are the same thing. The MAGA base is fracturing and the polls are showing that with the very number you are using as a retort.
(setting aside that it's illegal under international law, and unauthorized by Congress)
Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time, which is the ideal thing, but it seems like maybe we can't live in that ideal world, anyway...
I'm not suggesting that Iran shouldn't have a military, but instead questioning the purposes for which it would have one. Today its military is used for sending missiles at Gulf States, funding Hezbollah, and oppressing its people. So for it to have little to no military practically speaking would be a good thing.
Second at 2.5% GDP (again these figures are highly questionable) that's plenty to have defensive capabilities versus neighbors. There's nobody there to really worry about because who outside of the United States is going to invade Iran? And even then the US is only doing it because they won't stop doing crazy shit and launching missiles at everyone.
Well, they're currently being attacked. "Defending against attackers" is a pretty important purpose for a military.
UK and France have nukes, european nato part isn't going to be invaded without nuclear exchanges.
Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
I like to think this is true, but how many French soldiers coming home in body bags defending Lithuania will it take before they say enough? Are they going to just resort to nuclear weapons against Russia immediately? I don't think the nuclear umbrella is the trump card that it you might be portraying it to be. It's really difficult to say who would use those and when. There are some obvious cases, but there are also some not so obvious ones.
But nukes aren't enough. You're not winning the Ukraine war with your nuclear umbrella for example - that's being won on the ground with Ukrainian blood.
> Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Combined command of a military like this is incredibly difficult, and while I'd certainly agree that some specific militaries are quite capable of [1], I think the political and organizational system in Europe really poses a challenge. But even so those militaries lack power projection capabilities and lack in some other key areas.
[1] In order probably Ukraine -> UK -> France -> Poland and then nobody else registers. Ignoring Russia because they're not really European IMO.
> Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
Nah, we actually have money to easily afford both we just have a bunch of morons in charge (Democrats and Republicans) who, particular to healthcare, have gotten us the worst of both worlds. Education we're #1 there's no question about that.
I could make all sorts of claims on the spot here. It doesn't create a duty for people reading this thread to go investigate them.
<SPOILER> Then it certainly does not create a duty for people to go investigate, when the only difference is "someone replied telling someone to fact check" </SPOILER>
No one can do the thinking for you.
Also if I had an answer to your question I would say it. Hope you are able to find the answer.
There’s a good reason new accounts are colored green.
I think I'll need some reeducation on this concept of "dignity" you speak. Could you explain further?
Come on US media tell us the truth, you want to save people by killing them or to just kill them?
yet israel and the US both come out are infinitely worse in comparison, committing massive war crimes, lead by incompetent far-right extremists blinded by ideology and motivated by greed, personal gain and attempting to evade legal issues.
There is also "pride" as a moral code, where appearances of military superiority are what matters. At the start of the conflict the US and Israel appeared 100% invincible, and now they appear ... 99.9% invincible. So ... "victory for Iran" ... I guess.
In reality, of course, in response to "Israeli agression", Iran has severely damaged literally everyone who might have been on their side, with near-zero damage to Israel and US, while their own forces are dying in large numbers, while boasting of it. What an achievement! But that's where appearances matter. If they boast of it enough, maybe they can convince enough people ...
Recently, Trump has also said he’ll destroy the entire civilization. Tell me how that’s not planned genocide, per the accepted international definition of the word. I’m pretty sure Iran has made no such statement about Western or even US culture.
In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.
One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.
What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.
Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.
And now there's a new war, without any real reason (other than something something Netanyahu and they don't like the US) against a country that is a much more sophisticated adversary than Afghanistan or Iraq.
"sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades"
Surely by now we know nothing is inevitable? Especially over the range of decades.
Then of course they had to deal with Irak who invaded them using US weapons and intel. Including use of sarin gas, thanks to US intel.
The argument about democracy in Iran is hypocritical given that neither Trump or Israelis care about it at all. They just want weak client States.
The Iranians didn't wake up hating the USA one day and a little techouva would be healthy if we want this conflict to end.
It was Trump who ended the anti-nuclear treaty with Iran and the regular IAEA inspections within Iran.
Hamas does get some funding from Iran, but they are also the elected government of Gaza. Meanwhile Israel has destroyed hospitals, schools, and civilian homes throughout Gaza and the US is intentionally and preciselu destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran while Israel complains about missile attacks in civilian areas.
I think the reality is a lot of people aren't that smart. And sometimes even smart people can make bad choices. The average IQ is 100.
Here's an interesting random paper for you: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
"• Individuals who identify as Republican have greater probability knowledge
• Individuals who identify as Republican have higher verbal reasoning ability
• Individuals who identify as Republican have better question comprehension
• Cognitive ability’s effect on party identity works through socio-economic position"
At least this does not seem to support the common opinion here of presumably a democrat leaning crowd (based on the comments) who seem to think that their opponents are all morons.
Bottom line of sorts for me is that we need to be able to debate issues from first principles and based on facts. We often go to appeal to emotion and herd mentality instead. Very much so on these sorts of partisan button pushing threads.
<https://deluzio.house.gov/media/press-releases/joint-stateme...>
You shouldn't be, especially considering that Schumer and Durbin both voted for the Hague Invasion Act.
Yes, the only chance the US has going forward is to primary all current incumbents and hold both party leadership accountable for complicity in treason.
This was completely foreseeable and is a situation that appears to have arisen entirely due to vest interests stifling procurement of a suitable replacement in order to spruik up business for their own competing, but unfinished offering. Prior to the war in Iran, total cancellation of the procurement of E7's had been announced.
https://theaviationist.com/2026/04/01/e-3-awacs-loss-saudi-a...
My point is there is simply no verifiable numbers because both the opposition, particularly diaspora groups backed by the regimes enemies, and the government have incentives to be inaccurate. So trying to use the death toll as a talking point is not a good idea.
It's completely naive to underestimate the role of Mossad and the United States in the unrest. The former through actual Iranian nationals in their employ, and the latter in engineering the dollar shortage that led to the unrest in the first place (Scott Besant bragged about this).
I believe the long term damage this has caused in immeasurable and the only way to remedy this would be that both Israel and the US find some way to investigate who and why started this war - and possibly prosecuting any war crime that may have occurred.
Also, the EU needs to grow a spine, fast.
But alas, I have no hope of that happening. We’re all worse off for that.
The Iranian hit on the American radar in Qatar hasn't left the "Iron Dome" blind, figuratively or literally, and your proposed mechanisms of actions don't make sense.
Perhaps a problem here is that we are mixing up two theatres: Israel and GCC.
Iron dome exists in Israel, but the radars and air defense network was degraded in GCC, it is these patriots there that are having interceptor issues and shahed drone issues.
Israel is not being bombed by shaheds, it is being bombed by ballistic missiles that they are having problems intercepting and alerting population in advance.
you can check with the sourc elinks I provided that confirm that the radars in GCC were part of the early warning system for israel, and hitting radars in Qatar has impacted directly AD network in israel (reduced alert time significantly)
Recent reporting has indicated that contrary to your claim that the American radar system getting hit has left the Iron Dome "blind," Israeli missile detection has actually improved over the course of the war:
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/society/artc-israel-up...
https://www.nbcrightnow.com/national/israel-using-ai-to-fine...
Which makes sense, because:
1. Israeli air defense was not dependent on that American radar system (unlike what you keep claiming).
2. Israel has had many more data points on Iranian missile launches since the war started.
you are arguing against official annoucements from the IDF explaning why the civilian alert system now only gives short notice and will do so from now on, and you argue on the basis of fallacious rhetoric.
Stop doing this: it completely undermines the political argument because it makes it clear you are as uninterested in reality as the current administration.
It's rich to declare "they're lying" while happily being disinterested in the truth or clear communication.
Iron Dome is a specific interceptor system, and you can trivially look up what it is on Wikipedia.
As noted: Iron Dome intercepting ballistic missiles is an apparent new capability which it was not expected to be capable of: so it's kind of weird to turn up and say "Iron Dome can't intercept ballistic missiles anymore!" when no one except whoever developed the upgrades would've expected it to do that, and Israel has a number of other still unrelated to THAAD ballistic missile interceptor systems.
Now, specifically, you said that: "Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them". Are "they" Iranians? Shia? Muslims in general? People of the middle east in general? After having settled the question of who "they" are, you are then claiming that if they kill those who merely disagree with them, they consider those doing the killing to be martyrs? That would disagree with the common understanding of what a martyr is worldwide, and hence my comment about your claim being quite extraordinary.
I challenge you to not try to steer the topic away from my questions, or make additional claims without being specific and providing evidence for those either. I am not interested in widening the scope of the conversation into endless arguing.
Have a good night.
What happens when someone yells "Fact check!" at absolutely true things constantly? It erodes confidence. That's why "Person yelling fact check" isn't a typical or generalized role in normal discourse.
Yes, it's good to correct the incorrect. How does one do that typically? A rebuttal.
A supposed 'deferment to experts' on the internet is worth next to nothing, just a way to paint yourself a bit more altruistically while producing FUD.
But look at the account's comment history since registration a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bijowo1676
I am not; yet I prefer that my side stays rational without such chant’s (somebody has to be the responsible adult)
If you're talking about global capabilities, including power projection, then the ranking have to start with France, and have Italy very, very close to the UK if not ahead (if we don't take into account nukes), and then Spain should be slightly above Poland and Ukraine, maybe with Finland and Sweden in the mix (gripe3 and CV90?). German have the Gepard which seems to be the best response to drones, but their army is too new. The only thing Europe truly lacks is a strong IFV with reactive armor like the Bradley, maybe the Lynx would qualify but the quantity is clearly not enough.
And here I didn't talk about military doctrine and how well both French, Italian and German equipment fit their own, which to me is a huge advantage right after the early days of a conflict, because even when no one really know what to do and improvise, at least the whole army group improvise in the same direction.
I am wondering what you mean. Top-tier universities full of foreign nationals doing excellent research and funded by exorbitant fees? Sure.
But what about pre-college education?
Reading this thread, with people variously claiming things about Israel as if the country had sprung up from nothing with divine rights on the 7th october, or about Iran, as if the regime had suddenly appeared in 1979, without any US involvement in its suffering before (1953) or after (1984), makes me willing to question that education in the US is promoting critical thinking. Maybe the time spent singing the anthem would be better used actually reading history?
Education is about social mobility, a chance for anyone to participate depending on their intelligence/grit/motivation.
You guys only have education for the rich/elite.
If you have to pay for it, or be lucky to have parents next to good schools then you've failed.
> But nukes aren't enough.
Lookup french nuclear doctrine to see discouragement effect.
Also, european NATO is capable of bombing conventionally moscow/other russian cities in case of war with some losses.
Eliminating Putin/Leadership would probably stop any war.
That would probably be the first counter to any invasion with threat of using nukes as a threat to keep russia from going for nukes. (losing moscow/sankt petersburg might be too much for russia same as paris/berlin would be for other countries)
The other counter is some rapid deployment of troops to hold off any russian troops and make it very deadly for them until leadership decides to retreat.
Ucraine can't do that.
So that's great. Then, of course, anything the US does against Iran's islamist regime is justified according to you! Excellent news, that. Strange, I got a different impression from your tone.
P.S. you are now supposed to say that it merely means "you understand why" they act like this, not if it's justified. Even though you absolutely won't understand the US killing a few hundred Iranians in revenge.
Ending a cycle of violence also requires to accept where you did wrong (i.e "techouva"). The US have been bombing the world since 1943, with for the most part, little effect aside on the suffering of the civilians under fire.
The only intelligent move to stop the cycle of violence with Iran was the nuclear deal framework made by Obama. It was of course was terminated by Trump, which worked very well as the current war shows.
Bombing Iran during negociations, killing their supreme leader and negociators, commiting war crimes, won't clearly solve anything.
When I read such post, I feel that many people supporting the war in the US just have a sadistic instinct that needs to be expressed, whatever the consequences. Hurting (or, as the Trump aides say "fucking") other people won't fix the emptiness of your lives.
Translated to human terms: stop threatening the US and its allies.
The US position is not sadism, it’s how every nation except Iran tolerates one another, live and let live.
Russia and the US— they competed strongly with one another during the Cold War but generally respected red lines. Russia withdrew its kinetic threat from Cuba, the US knew circa 1998 that expanding NATO through the old Warsaw Pact would make no friends in Moscow. Strong, rules-based brinksmanship all the way around.
Iran is just about ideological extremism. Sometimes there are rules, or used to be, but the IRGC signed up a bunch of unprofessional clowns to wage total war on its behalf and, at core, talks like “mutually assured destruction” would be a total “win”, provided Israel was on the other side. If either superpower exposed that kind of philosophy in the Cold War can you imagine the calamity? It’s inherently destabilizing.
I'd wait for your apology, but I'm old enough to know I won't get one.
Am I wrong about the comment history? Might be biased.
Not having sanctions potentially strengthens a regime more than sanctions do, embeds them in the global geopolitical/cultural/economic stage, normalises their behaviour, and goes against a lot of people's deontology.
Look at Israel: no sanctions, strong Zio regime, majority of US/German pop supported the "self-defense" argument for decades, complete normalisation of Palestinian genocide until the horror reached an unbearable threshold. Etc., etc.
Yes, sanctions are far from perfect, but I strongly believe that a world with Israel santioned would have been a much better place for everyone, including the Israelis (from having to contend with their ideology).
Edit: I'm also aware that my argument is not perfect either. For example, I wouldn't qualify what Cuba has or what Iraq had as sanctions in the sense that I'm talking about: these are to my eyes an economic war of aggression by the US/West. What I'm defending is sanctions on fascist and ethonationalist global/regional superpowers that are engaging in large-scale horror. But I'm aware how leaky my definition is.
However, wide sanctions on large countries such as Russia or Iran are now proven to be quite ineffective in the long run. Even worse, by preventing the creation of a middle-class, you won't have the conditions to start a democracy later, after a possible regime change.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it's what data shows.
And sanctions don't prevent countries from committing atrocities either. What about the deaths and suffering induced by sanctions? 500k Iraqi children were estimated to have died due to the US sanctions. The architect of the policy told that it was "worth it". Was it?
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
- removing their leverage over you is also good.
Even if regime will not change, it will be weaker
I guess that, just like Madeleine Albright, you believe that 500k Iraqi children death caused by US sanctions were "worth it"? (US still wanted to invade after, proof that sanctions worked!)
https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-ira...
Counter-question/game:
Hypothetically, imagine that you become president of US today, inheriting current situation. What would you do regarding Iran situation?
What is the correct action now in current situation?
Spoiler: I think there is no “correct” solution, somebody will be hurt in the end despite best wishes.
Note: Lower supply of oil and fertiliser affects poorer countries more than the rich ones (possibility of famine in Africa). Current Iran government just killed their own civilians a month ago in thousands to end protests; and repressions will likely repeat as protests are likely to repeat. (Irans populace seem to be quite educated and want some reforms) Ground invasion of Iran would cost a lot of lives - civilian casualties always exist.
But honestly, what would you choose to do?
Germany stills needs and wants russian energy, because they're overpaying a lot currently, but russians don't need the german paper industry anymore.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-...
In the case of a war, it is of course useful, but it won't solve the long-term issue of the nature of the Russian regime, which has gotten only more entrenched since 2014.
Sanctions on Russia are us not funding the war on Ukraine.
ohh, they use AI... this sounds like a YC startup pitch, I bet they also use AI agents and Claude Code to improve air defense...
then why all these radars were even needed in the first place? why did US taxpayers spent billions procuring installing and maintaining these radars, if simpel fine-tuning with Claude Code would work just as well ??
The US president is not in charge of the application of human rights in Iran. It's amazing that Americans are so concerned about human rights in oil-rich countries, only. Right?
The US generally don't understand other countries' internal dynamics and only leave a mess after dropping bombs to "liberate" those ungrateful civilians.
Obama's JCPOA was a good framework, I'd work to reinstall it.
Few things:
- Please don't talk about “rules-based brinksmanship” when the US commits bombing and decapitation strikes during negotiations. Or when they send real estate developers to discuss nuclear programs[1].
- Iran had agreed to limit its enrichment and allow inspectors in to verify it. Of course, it was too much for Israelis who didn't want another competing power in the region. The end of the agreement led Iran to restart enriching its uranium at higher rates, having the (expected) complete opposite effect than what was wanted. Who's the clown here? Trump.
- The US' “ally”, Israel, currently has a far-right religious Zionist government that ticks all the boxes for ideological extremism. It also has a MAD doctrine regarding its illegal nukes. [2]
- Hezbollah was born after the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. While it was structured by Iran, its ranks are made of Lebanese citizens. Many non-Shia Lebanese will agree that it's the main defense against the invasion of their country, which is desired by the Zionist right to achieve their “greater Israel” project[3]. While Hezbollah is problematic now, its removal should be accompanied by a commitment by Israel not to invade its neighbors and to stop the illegal colonization of the West Bank.
In general, it's a recurrent strategy by Israel: favor frictions, violence, and fuel the most extremist of your opponents, to justify retaliation, and then allow you to extend your position. For instance, Israel was helping Gulf States to fund Hamas before the recent war started.[4] The US is an accomplice, as Israeli money heavily funds its politicians. It's not an ally.
[0]: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/cia-files-prove-america-...
[1]: https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2026-03-11/us-negotiators-w...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/26/what-is-greater-isr...
[4]: https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2020-02-24/ty-artic...
I really think this sort of "Israel is in control" thing leans into conspiracy lala land at best, and certain very dangerous and bad territory at worst.
And Israel is, through AIPAC, one of the largest donors in congress. Myriam Adelson, an Israeli billionaire and outspoken zionist, gave Trump $100 million for his campaign. Of course she is outright buying Trump, asking him to support the illegal colonization of the West Bank.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/miriam-adelson-gives-100-milli...
On top of that, evangelical christians, who tend to be radical zionists, are Trump's core voter base and fund directly Tsahal and Israel through donations. You can learn directly from the actors in this excellent israeli documentary:
So yeah, not really a conspiration, it's all out in the open. It's also not just a foreign policy, Trump threatened to end universities' funding if they didn't forbid criticism of Israel and allowed the administration to monitor them. A large part of his aides and government members are also Jewish and zionist advocates, which of course steers the policy.
Jared Kushner even does real estate promotion in the illegal colonies, when he's not sent to fail negociations regarding nuclear enrichment
Best steelman I can come up with is you're seeing deep red, so it's hard to see "Then go get some!" is suggesting he could fact-check his own question instead of asking the room to do it for him.
Which is the opposite of your characterization that I think people are responsible for investigating strangers' unsourced claims. We violently agree, not disagree.
Making this exchange all the curiouser.
Are you inebriated? I only ask because it's unusual to see someone on HN choosing to say obviously incorrect things, aggressively, on purpose, just to talk down to someone. Much less making bullying attempts based on comment history.
The IRGC and Iranian leadership assume that since Israel is just one nation, and not a big one, that they really really want to annihilate, it should be no big deal for everyone else to accept. But that is a dangerous, even existential proposal on both sides, as the IRGC knows, partly because the US position worldwide is about projecting security for partners.
Iran actually occupies a mirror position regarding the Palestinians, who have fought and suffered greatly. So Iran strives to reverse the positions of the Israelis and Palestinians— not to raise all ships, but swap them— which isn’t a moral cause from an impartial perspective, it’s just picking a different winner.
The US and Israel sought peace through negotiations for decades regarding the Palestinians, while Iran has continually plotted and waged war, which it now has on its home soil. The US and Israel have genuinely sought to peacefully resolve the situation, while Iran has not, not in my lifetime.
The problem with Israel is that the initial colonization was mostly illegal and problematic. Now, time has passed and countries should recognize its existence, while Israel should also stop its plans of a "greater Israel", including invading and bombing all of its neighbors. And stop the illegal colonization of the West Bank, along with their policies and ideology treating Palestinians like animals.
Israel is a rogue state, with illegal nuclear weapons, that protects criminals from all over the world and refuses to extrade them and commits war crimes in the open. Your way of thinking, which it is a pure white dove in a sea of evil muslims won't solve anything : Israelis have to do techouva if they want peace.
Unfortunately, the current far-right government pursues a religious messianic plan, including the destruction of muslim holy sites to rebuild the temple, so they won't accept a lasting peace.
Iran is however not an existential threat to Israel, as long as it doesn't have a nuke. So the efforts should concentrate on this aspect, to which the Iranians were open to discuss...until the Israelis assassinated the negotiation team and the supreme leader that could have imposed a desescalation deal.