The only port large enough for a carrier (at the time) was/is Dubai but that just makes the ship a sitting duck right now. I can’t imagine going that long without a break.
I sometimes see people making fun of the book “The Art of War” because it’s mostly stuff like “you can’t win a war if you aren’t able to feed your troops” that should be obvious to anybody who’s competent. Situations like this show that it’s still useful because sometimes you have leaders that need very simple concepts to be explained to them.
I think that psychologically not knowing when it will end is extra difficult. When I served in Afghanistan I knew pretty well how long the deployment would be so my expectations were set. If they kept adding extra months I'd imagine you start to feel like Yossarian.
Getting extended arbitrarily is horrible. The only thing worse is when they let someone else go home early, and force you to stay for no real reason. (Not even drawing straws or similar.) That genuinely broke me. Doing this to people is cruel, full stop.
(Fortunately, for as bad as it was for me, it did at least make it impossible to ignore my mental health, and was the beginning of a long, long road of treatment.)
Damn, fighting for the epstein alliance and the president of peace sounds awful. Still, Trump will soon be able to get the strait of hormuz open like it was before he attacked iran, and he'll be able to get Iran's word they won't make nukes, just like they said they wouldn't before he attacked them...which will be a better victory than spending 20 years to replace the taliban with the taliban I suppose.
Fucking idiots.
From where I'm sitting, the USA already lost, it's just a matter of how badly bruised they are when they leave the fight. The outcomes so far are:
- Depleted munitions stores, so much so that defense systems have been relocated
- US and ally bases have been successfully attacked. - Tolls have been exercised on tankers going through the straight by Iran.
- Depleted the strategic petroleum reserves of many counties.
- The President had to flee talks due to "credible threats" from Iran. When was the last time a adversarial power was able to hit a sitting president?
- Iraq is discussing allowing pro-Iranian to operate unimpeded within their territory, allowing them to continue to strike Saudi-US assets in the region.
- A "pressure campaign" that isn't working. The USA killing Iranian citizens is just helping the IRGC stay in power.
- An inability to contain the situation has cast doubt on the USA's general military capability.
Maybe the situation sorts itself out. After all, everyone the region is losing out on sweet oil revenues the longer this goes on. So leaders get together, form a "spread the wealth, not the bombs" initiative that allows the USA to exit while saving face, and the oil pie gets sliced up a little differently.
Lol beautiful.
And the two at the top (bottom) of this don't seem to care one iota.
A national disgrace.