RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15hr ago
Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one. If the choice is between reducing Iran to Afghanistan-esque hodge-podge of pre-industrial warring tribes and giving the IRGC access to nuclear missiles we choose to turn Iran into another Afghanistan.
This is where the issue appears - the US is not strong enough to do this without using H-bombs. And even if it were possible, it would be extremely costly and dangerous.
It is very hard to bomb an industrious country into being a failed state. Intense bombing was tried on North Vietnam and Cambodia. The US dropped about 50-70 kg of bombs per person on these relatively small countries. Iran is a large country. The number of bombs needed is extremely high! Even burning down whole cities is not sufficient. That was tried on Japan and Germany and again, did not work. A-bombs, famine, a Soviet ground invasion of Manchuria and the destruction of Japan's offensive capabilities in sea/air power were needed to force a near unconditional surrender. A ground invasion was imminent and they were preparing for it. In Germany the Red Army had to storm Berlin before surrender.
Let's throw the 'decapitation strikes killing leaders' theory of war right out, that has never worked in history and clearly isn't working here. Bombing people just makes them hate you more, they become less willing to surrender.
The US does not have the necessary ground forces for a ground invasion of Iran. It's extremely mountainous, difficult terrain on the other side of the world. The US navy doesn't even dare enter the straits of Hormuz because of all the drones and ballistic missiles. How is America supposed to deploy a million men or more to Iraq, to what bases, with what supplies? Those bases are being bombed and shelled. It'd take 12-18 months to get all the forces in the field. Would a million men even be enough? It's politically impossible, would incur a staggering number of casualties over a multi-year war with disastrous effects for broader US strategy. Iran doesn't fear a ground invasion, they know the US wouldn't try.
And then there are all the things Iran can do to strike back. Iran could attack with dirty bombs if they so chose, against the US or Israel. They could wreck oil production across the Middle East in revenge. They could launch drone strikes against the US homeland like how Ukraine does against Russia. There are all kinds of things 90 million smart people can do to make problems if they want.
While I'm not privy to the specifics my guess is that the plan is to hold Kharg Island hostage to force Iranian compliance.
It's not possible to force compliance by taking one small island. To force compliance you need to have enough strength to conquer the country. If the war goal is SMO style 'demilitarization', 'denuclearization' and 'de-antisemitization' (per Trump's rambling about picking the leader of Iran) then the US needs to credibly threaten a successful invasion and conquest of the country. Russia's ground invasion needs to reach that stage to secure victory. The Ukrainians would capitulate if their army was smashed. But they haven't capitulated since their army hasn't been smashed, they hold out hope for improved circumstances and just draft more troops.
Americans need to stop thinking as though the US is global policeman and more like a successful gangster. Lots of money and guns. But other gangs also have guns. Other gangs can impose costs too. The gains of a street war may not be worth the costs in blood, wealth and bitter feuding.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
If you think Trump is taking Israeli intelligence over American intelligence you have crazy priors about what is going on in the Oval Office.
He didn't listen to General Caine who warned about all the obvious flaws in the 'bomb Iran' approach that Trump is now discovering the hard way. Someone must've been telling him it would be easy, Iran was about to collapse.
The Israelis have been shovelling out that same old story about Iran being a few months away from a nuclear bomb, they've been going on about that for decades now. But Trump still buys it, he went on about how they were going to get a nuke and would've if he didn't stop them. US intelligence is much more cautious about this.
You can follow through on 99 promises but if you renege and do the opposite on a high profile promise and can't explain why (Israel was going to strike first, the nuclear weapons that weren't actually being made), it can easily outweigh whatever promises you do make. Especially if it raises oil prices and induces a recession.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I admit I didn't perceive that it was an old paper. They certainly are continuing to do this kind of research nevertheless. Nobody has been held accountable.
And after all these many years, what have been the fruits of this research? Has it led to anything good or useful? Just general 'advancing theoretical science will lead to future unknown applications'? Could the money have been reallocated to other fields instead which would also have unknown future applications without the risk of creating deadly diseases?
After the first few million deaths it's time to stop giving out charity. If a nuclear power plant melts down, kills 20 million people and dislocates the whole of society for a couple of years, then nobody would be in a charitable mood for the people who slipped up making it. Regardless of intentions they demonstrated appalling negligence. If you're making something that can kill tens of millions of people you must be very careful and rigorously justify the value of your work.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It is with great anger that I say they're doing it again. Indeed, they never stopped.
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-make-body-bags-fast-enough
The Fouchier and Kawaoka papers on adapting the bird flu H5N1 virus to be efficiently spread between ferrets, and onwards to humans, provoked the dangerous GOF controversy back in 2012. Other papers doing the same thing on H5N1 from China or on different bird flu viruses in the US received much less attention – see end of essay for a list. Among them is the nightmare paper; there is nothing more frightening. It came from a well-known flu research group at the University of Maryland funded by NIH NIAID contract HHSN26620070001.
They took a H7N1 flu virus of ostriches and adapted it to respiratory transmission between ferrets, just as Drs. Fouchier and Kawaoka did with their H5N1 bird flu viruses. Readers will know this is synonymous with human-to-human transmission. Why do this?
They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all. Would this be dangerous for people? Who knows? You'd have to test it which is ethically and logically even more dangerous. So there is no value to this research. All we know is that 'this specific disease could be super dangerous' and they helpfully put its genome up on the internet.
If the disease is dangerous to humans like it is for ferrets and does leak out, then we're in for COVID with huge lethality rates, 30% rather than a measly 0.3%.
I think there is a real blindspot about people's motivations that many don't fully appreciate. There were all these conspiracy theories going around about how COVID was a US bioweapons attack against China or Iran, a plot to shackle everyone with vaccines... But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers. These scientists were just doing science with complete disdain for the risks. They were going out to caves to gather these coronaviruses and bring them to Wuhan. Daszak/Ecohealth were using humanized mice (mice that behave immunologically like humans) to assess pandemic potential of bat coronaviruses. They wanted to insert some furin cleavage sites too.
Then we get a virus in Wuhan. It's closest ancestor was from Laos. How did it get to Wuhan? In a truck. How did Covid get so good at infecting people? It was engineered, with those humanized mice. How did it get that weird furin cleavage site? Artificially.
And naturally the Wuhan virology database disappears due to 'hacking attempts' just before this virus is released. So nobody quite knows what viruses they were working with... Ironically this completely undoes even the silly scientific angle, they made all this effort to make a database of viruses and then conceal it forever due to 'hacking'.
And none of this is even helpful in any serious way! Who cares? The amount of super-dangerous viruses that could possibly exist is beyond measure. At least with AI there are some positive usecases.
Claude choked up even thinking and researching about this stuff that human scientists are getting paid to do. They keep doing it, there is no sign that they've stopped, even after the last lab leak killed tens of millions of people and made a huge inconvenience for everyone on the planet, they somehow persuaded everyone it was low-class to conspiracize about it. Everyone was just supposed to get over the experts bringing us Torment Nexus 1, Torment Nexus 2, 3 and 4 are still in the works (funded by taxpayers). The experts find that the experts were not to blame, there was some bat pangolin farce instead. They'll do it again unless stopped. GOF bioresearchers delenda est.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well Trump did run on a platform of 'America First' and 'no new wars in the Middle East, in fact Kamala is the one who'll start wars'...
It's like how in the UK, people were voting for Brexit as part of a way to reduce immigration. Then Boris ramped immigration way up. And so now the Tory Party is gone, effectively wiped off the map just after winning a huge electoral victory under a populist platform. Farage is clearly trying to do the same thing, there is this elaborate misdirection about his real agenda and priorities, he wants to get Poles out and bring more Indians in, to neutralize anti-immigration sentiment, he certainly has no problem with Islam... That's what Brexit was really about in his mind, a dog and pony show for the rubes to persuade them that they were being listened to.
Being a populist is easy, you just have to follow through on your promises and give your voters what they want. You've adeptly explained the 'make promises and then betray promises' part. The next arc coming up is 'get shown the door by voters'. Populism is a reaction against politicians who make all these promises and then renege on them.
All Trump had to do is what he said - mass deportations, cutting leftist grifting to dry up the NGO blob, avoiding foreign wars. Not hard! But instead he shows his real priorities - slavish obedience to the latest batch of Israeli 'intelligence' and all the shady Shapiros, Levins and Kushners in his inner circle.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
As we speak, Trump is trying (bitching on truth social) to marshal a global coalition to reopen the straits of Hormuz. Nobody has shown up.
There are 2 US carrier groups in the region. Even they aren't brave enough to go in close to Iran and open up the straits.
If the IRGC are incompetent, then what is there to be afraid of? Why should the US and Israel need to call for help in this war? Coalition-building clearly wasn't part of the plan before the war, Trump spent much of his time sneering at Europe. It seems that only very recently has Trump discovered a need for allies...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Absolutely in the Iran war. All videos under 10 seconds are now suspect. It's really annoying since now shaky camera angles and ditzy women repeating inane comments again and again are now signs of authenticity.
There's a long and annoying discourse about whether Netanyahu is really dead, based on sus analyses of him having six fingers in a video when for the life of me I can only see 5, whether a coffee spills or not...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
When the oil runs out, the Gulf States will wither into nothing. Already it rather looks like they're withering away since they're so shit at fighting, even with all the fancy weapons they purchased. The crass prostitutes and grifters seem to be moving out of Dubai.
I dispute that the Gulf is highly developed. All their development is done by other people. It's just development that happens to be located in the Gulf and whose fruits happen to accrue to Arabs since imperialism went out of fashion at a very fortunate time for these people. It's not true development and comes without the underlying productivity and industriousness one expects of a real developed country.
Nigeria is a 'it never even began' country, irrelevant. They make the Arabs look like a bastion of civilization.
If the water was really off in Tehran, wouldn't the people be dying of thirst? The water situation there is bad. But droughts do make it difficult to get water. In Australia we also had problems with water during the Millennium drought requiring rationing. It didn't get quite as bad as Iran but it was pretty bad.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't know why they added the vortex, another 'can steamroll if you get the right techs' unit like the arclight. I guess it's weak to light units? Seems like it can get oppressive at times with that dps.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war
Whenever there was rough material parity, the Japanese usually won. They often won while outnumbered. The Allies never achieved a feat like the Malaya campaign where they steamrolled a Japanese force that outnumbered or outgunned them. You see battles like Guadalcanal and it's always the same story. Allies: 60,000+ men. Japan: 36,200 men. Not exactly an impressive feat of arms, winning with more men!
Warrior spirit and elan really is important. What happened in Korea? The Chinese soldiers really wanted to win and that apparently is enough to compensate for having no armour, airpower, motorized supply, just being a light infantry force... They put North Korea back on the map with elan.
Sufficient firepower can overwhelm warrior spirit of course, supplies are obviously needed... At the end of the day it doesn't matter how you win so long as you do.
But look at Afghanistan! What did the Taliban have, exactly? Money? Weapons? Training? Numbers? Or was it just elan and will to win, determination and confidence in their values? I doubt 1 in 10 of our soldiers would tolerate fighting like the Taliban did, without medivac, without armour, without sophisticated training, without airpower, without all our advanced technology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The Gulf Arabs are absolutely in the petrostate trap. They don't make things, they just function as a shady tax haven and cheap-energy zone for certain industries. They have ambitions in AI, not in making AI models but buying GPUs made by industrious countries, hosting AI models made by clever companies, exploiting their cheap energy.
The Gulf buys US weapons, they buy Chinese weapons, they buy (or attempt to buy) US protection. Who makes the actual oil equipment and drills? Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Samsung... The Saudis have some Chinese made ballistic missiles waiting for Pakistani nuclear bombs they think they paid for.
Iran makes their own oil equipment. Iran's MAPNA Group makes gas power plants at world standards. They are trying to export technology, not just oil. Their oil industry has problems, as you would expect given sanctions. But it is their oil industry and not imported oil industry.
Iran makes things, they build their own missiles, drones and weapons. They develop their own strategies to take advantage of their enemies' weaknesses. Their proxies do a good job.
The UAE's proxies in Sudan haven't covered themselves in glory and they're merely fighting Sudan, not exactly a tough opponent. The Saudi army has all this fancy US gear. And how do they perform against the Houthis? They got wrecked by the Houthis.
Iran is far superior to the Gulf Monarchies in governance. They may be an enemy of the US but they are not stupid. There's a huge power gap between Iran and Turkey and Pakistan at the top end of the Islamic world, then there are the Gulf monarchies and below them assorted Arab riff-raff. The Gulf states don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Their manifest impotence in this war is obvious, America has to do all the fighting for them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Kulak clearly says that the US will fuck it up somehow, that the actual plan will be way more shambolic and half-cocked and sure to fail.
I agree. Also, Azerbaijan is probably weak to drones/missiles. They don't want to lose their oil do they? Wouldn't it make more sense for them to profit off the price spike than potentially get wrecked?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I don't think the Iranians have any intention of 'playing ball.' They're very angry. The guy in charge just had his father, wife, kids get blown up by US/Israel. I don't think he gives a damn, he is out for blood.
The people who might've been doing the 'friendly regime' are eating bombs and perhaps changing their political stance. Why would some random person in Tehran think more positively about Israel or America after getting their apartment blown up or coated in a thick layer of toxic petrochemicals from all the oil fires?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
There's already been a good deal of bombing of oil infrastructure. Take a breath of fresh air in Tehran, you can smell it. Haifa too. Oil infrastructure in Oman got bombed.
Much easier and safer to just counter-blockade from afar I think.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I can't understand what the point is of seizing Kharg island. The US could just bomb it to leave it unusable for as long as they want? Or just steal the tankers at sea? It's not like it would be hard to blow up some oil storage terminals.
Landing troops there would just make them a juicy target and difficult to resupply. Iran can launch all kinds of things from inland at them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
I didn't say 'you must only hit confirmed military targets'. I say that this innate risk must be taken into account, wars must not be whitewashed as squeaky-clean 'precision strikes' against just the buddies. There is no 'sci fi precision' killing just combatants, there is no 'literally every single casualty is military' outside a propaganda reel.
I don't think even Hegseth would disagree with me here, if he were being honest.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
The US has hit Iran with thousands of bombs and the general level of precision is terrifying sci-fi absurdity. There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian.
Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
Suddenly they've developed incredible accuracy and precision, in the last couple of years? Under the watch of Hegseth 'slash and burn, oohrah, real manly warfare no legal bullshit', just as they cut the office who's supposed to be preventing this? And they can manage this precision in a country with much more sophisticated air defences than Afghanistan or post-invasion Iraq, where ISR drones can and are being shot down?
How can this be? AI? Israel makes great use of AI and they killed lots of civilians in Gaza in some combination of neglect and malice.
Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.
Focusing all your attention on the single incident that might possibly have been the US hitting a civilian target
It's not going to be just a single incident, come on. Weapons miss, intelligence is faulty, fog of war is fog of war.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
The Iranians weren't blocking the Straits of Hormuz until after the war began.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
there's being on American's shit list, and there's 'bombing the Strait of Hormuz and being treated as a rogue state by everyone'.
That's not what is happening. China is still getting about 50% of what they were getting, directly from Iran. Western aligned countries are not getting oil through the straits.
It's a more or less selective blockade. Just like the Houthis in the Red Sea, which again the US really struggled to partially reopen...
Assassination has never worked, not once in the entire history of warfare. Nobody fought a war and it was decided by an assassination. That's why we have large militaries instead of ninjas and spies and missiles that would be much cheaper. The Israelis don't seem to appreciate this, they tried assassinations against Hamas for a few years... doesn't work. Hamas is still there, just as before despite considerable effort to destroy them. For some reason they keep trying it and people keep thinking it will work, despite literally no empirical evidence whatsoever and great evidence to the contrary. If assassinations work, then you're really dealing with some kind of gang or a very low-tier organization, not a real country. To destroy Hamas the Israelis needed to invade and conquer Gaza, kill Hamas from the bottom up, not just rain down bombs here and there.
If Iran blew up Trump and Jared and Vance and Hegseth and another 20 four star generals, that wouldn't impair the US a jot. They have plenty more generals, plenty more politicians. It'd be quite embarrassing but the entire army, navy and air force is still there, the nuclear forces remain, the wealth creating industries are there, the energy is there, the population is there, the food is there. The US would not have a civil war because some officials got blown up. Americans would instead double down and lash out aggressively.
To really break America, you'd need to crush the entire US military including the nuclear forces, you have to massacre millions and millions of Americans, bomb out cities, induce famine, starve off energy... And all that can only really be done by a huge nuclear attack or a ground invasion. Same with Iran, albeit scaled down.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
What about delivering on prosperity? Has Carney actually lowered cost of living, made things more affordable?
In Australia I see a certain symmetry. We have a similarly boring, albeit less qualified, centre-left Labor leader in Albanese. He was elected on a platform of lowering electricity prices and improving cost of living, promptly failed to do that (prices went in the other direction), got re-elected anyway. I was sympathetic to Dutton (former leader of the centre-right Liberal Party) and his more ambitious nuclear energy plan but the country rejected him totally. I guess Dutton wasn't charismatic enough, too Trump-coded.
The Liberal Party seems to be totally disintegrating, the more immigration-restrictionist One Nation is demolishing them in polling.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Why do you keep saying this? The USAF is almost certainly using Falco right now, it was operationally deployed and successfully used on wartime targets in the same theater last year!
You seem to have this idea that a countermeasure is magically 100% effective against all threats of that type and lets you operate with impunity against enemies armed with that weapon. But no countermeasure is 100% effective. Even if they were, the truth is that if you have 20 rockets and your enemy has 21, you are going to get hit regardless of how good your tech works. It also does not mean the tech is useless (the enemy hit you once instead of 21 times!)
It doesn't need to be 100% effective, it needs to enable the campaign to achieve its key political goals. One of those goals is almost certainly to enable energy exports through the straits of Hormuz, it requires US Arab allies to not get punished by Iran and threatened with de-desalination, de-energization. I am not imposing excessively high standards on the US military. The Trump administration and the strategic situation is imposing these excessively high standards with the choice of campaign. They did a really poor job justifying and explaining and gathering support for the war, so the standards for success are higher than they would've been.
Another strategic goal is 'regime change in Iran' which is clearly not going as planned. The leadership change we have seen is not the kind the US was looking for! A key part of regime change would be crushing Iran's ability to strike back, by taking away their leverage on the Gulf and on Israel. They will be most likely to concede if they have no cards left. So while it sure is hard to defend against air attacks, that's what the US and gang has to do. It sure is hard to attack and destroy hardened and dispersed underground missile facilities, yet the nature of the campaign requires this. Even that may well not be sufficient.
Ukraine may well be shooting drones with machineguns. The Apache can shoot at them with the 30mm. But nevertheless, they are getting through and that is endangering the campaign objectives. Nevermind mines now entering the equation. The Littoral Combat Ship now has a chance to show its qualities...
It's an asymmetric war. Iran's goals are innately easier to meet than the US goals. This war is going worse for America than either Gulf War because of the much greater disruption to energy production and energy flows. Perhaps that will change. If it does then the US will be in a much better situation. Lower reported US casualties is not such a big deal. Again it's not an even playing ground, US casualty tolerance attacking a country on the other side of the world without much clear reason (was it Israel, nukes, were they gonna conquer the whole Middle East?) is going to be much lower than Iran's casualty tolerance of soldiers defending their homeland from the 'Epstein Alliance.'
It's certainly possible that the US burn rate of interceptors was more than calculated, but also the US shifting munitions from theater to theater isn't particularly unusual, I don't think.
South Korea paid a great deal politically and economically in Chinese retaliation for those missiles and sensors to be placed there. South Korea is more important than blowing up Iran. They produce the memory needed for AI, the memory China desperately wants but can't have. They have a serious defence industry, they can produce ships. They are highly dependent on energy imports from the Gulf. Slapping them in the face with this war may well have really serious strategic effects if they perceive that the US is unreliable and considers them a second-rate ally.
Cruise missiles? Four, maybe five digits.
10,000 cruise missiles is not that much. Russia used something like 5000 in Ukraine thus far. Iran is roughly Ukraine-sized, larger in population. Depleting these stores of munitions while China is looming doesn't make much sense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
This was literally my claim, which you rejected.
No, you were making an extremely silly and irrelevant demand to know 'how much' better fusion rockets would be after another extremely silly and pedantic point of saying that cars and horses do not use the rocket equation. I was the one who said that the physics had already been worked out, in general terms. You asked this:
This is true. How much better? What are the numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation in order to compare to the other numbers that we can plug into the rocket equation? It is only then that we can really get a sense for the scale of how much better future technologies can be.
We don't have fusion, let alone fusion rockets. We have designs, many of which may be totally unworkable since we don't have fusion and don't know how heavy the reactor will be, what net energy is yielded or what kind of constraints there will be. That is precisely why asking for these specific details is dumb. I already explained this but you didn't understand it.
I don't understand your somewhat patronizing approach of asking about concept-based performance. I don't need to cite a specific fusion design to know that fusion designs can provide much more capable rocketry. That's inherent given the nature of fusion vs chemical rocketry. We already know this. There is plenty of variance between designs and some may just not end up being workable.
We do know for sure is that the basic physics of fusion power provide vastly more energy per unit of fuel. Once we develop fusion power, we will have a much better idea of how to go about this since we will know if we're using tokamaks or lighter Helion-style approaches, if magnetic nozzles are practical, how heavy the radiation shielding needs to be.
What we DO know is that most fusion systems provide much better specific impulse and exhaust velocity than chemical rockets can. Thus, in general, fusion designs are much more suitable for exploration and colonization of the outer solar system. Asking for specific details on specific systems we cannot produce or test is not smart. Those details don't exist in the real world.
This is baseline, expected knowledge for an educated layman. You claim to be an engineer or technical in some respect. You seriously need to develop reading comprehension. It is a vital skill you will need in your work, presuming you actually are an engineer and not just LARPing for internet smart guy points.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
You're shifting the goalpost from claiming that "the message hasn't filtered through" to claiming that things have not been moving fast enough for your liking
You brought up these lasers and cheap, effective anti-drone weapons. If these weapons are so great, why don't we see them in action? If they're not mature, then the sensible thing to do is not to start a war of choice against a power with a huge drone and missile arsenal. Again, that brings us back to my main point about the wise planners being sidelined by the actual policymakers.
Trump doesn't understand any of this stuff. He said the Iranians Tomahawked their own school, he's not capable of gauging what might even be believable as a lie, let alone what is actually going on in the real world.
If they had all their ducks in a row, we wouldn't be seeing any videos of them taking losses during a major regional war
Losses is one thing, bases and strategic radars being destroyed is another. Russia quite clearly did not have their ducks in a row for the invasion of Ukraine, for what it's worth. The initial plan failed and Russia switched strategy to a war of attrition.
But why aren't these systems you brought up deployed and defending? If they're worth bringing up, then they ought to be adding value.
The first thing that should've been considered in a regime change operation in Iran is what the actual goal is. Trump wants to appoint a leader (with what ground troops?), Rubio wants to blow up the navy and the missile production facilities, Bibi seems to want to make a chaotic mess. Trump has been saying the war is over but the US has won and needs to win more, it's an incoherent mess.
The second thing that should've been considered is preventing Iran closing the straits of Hormuz. There should've been US ships actually there, physically escorting freighters. They should be using these cheap effective anti-drone and anti-missile weapons to great effect. Not sitting back hundreds of kilometres, implicitly showing the straits of Hormuz aren't under US control. But that hasn't been done because the US navy is rightly concerned about air and missile attack sinking their ships. Which is why this war shouldn't have been started.
Have you done any baseline research to see if the US has, in the past, moved any munitions from different theaters before to fight in a war after the war started?
An administration whose military strategy and political ideology explicitly called for a refocus away from Middle Eastern wars shouldn't be sacrificing more important theaters for the sake of a Middle East war.
Have you considered that if the US prepositioned all of its valuable THAAD ammunition in the theatre prior to the initiation of hostilities and it got destroyed during the Iranian's large opening salvo people would be using that as evidence of US stupidity and incompetence instead?
If the US can't manage to decentralize and safely store munitions (or produce munitions at scale) then it has no business launching a massive bombing offensive. Prepositioning stores to survive ballistic missile waves is pretty obvious stuff that the US should already know how to do, there should be lots of planning for this.
why would China bother to do that?
China's goal is to annex Taiwan. Taiwan doesn't want to starve. Thus it may attempt to besiege the island via airpower, targeting food and energy imports to secure submission. They want the island for political and strategic reasons not economic reasons, China has plenty of wealth already.
China would much prefer a quick blitz but they'd take a pyrrhic victory to a destabilizing defeat. They'd do just what Putin did, double down if the blitz fails. I expect a blitz to fail, amphibious operations are hard... Power is zero-sum, beating America and taking Taiwan might well let them achieve hegemony in East Asia. Colby worried about just that. America also inflicting considerable pain on its Asian allies is very unhelpful here for coalition building.
I don't care what your profession is. The point I am making is extremely simple and straightforward and you still have not understood it.
The physics has already been worked out! We do not need to go over it. It is totally pointless nitpicking.
My claim was that we already had pretty decent published literature on various not-yet-existing propulsive methods, that this literature uses the standard physics and the standard methods of analysis and standardized performance metrics.
Read my comments again, understand them. You will find this is not a line of argument that helps you! My point is not 'Mini-Mag Orion is the One True Path to the outer solar system' that requires a specific technical justification but a general point that using a massively more efficient power source is superior for long-range spaceflight, even though it will take a long time to develop such rocketry.
This really does not require incredible reading comprehension to understand, I am quite surprised that a self-declared aerospace engineer cannot grasp it. I highly doubt you are a real aerospace engineer, since if you were you'd know that a fair range of fusion designs are vastly superior to conventional rockets, something that is so obvious laymen would know it. So there really wouldn't be any point of making this silly argument.
It wasn't hard to buy Nvidia shares at the lows in 2022 and make 10x. It was hardly an obscure company back then. Even pre-ChatGPT it was pretty clear AI was going to be a big thing if you'd read a few things about technology between 2020 and 2022. There were early versions of GPT-3-based AI that I, random guy off the street who couldn't tell you what a tensor is, checked out and was surprised by the intelligence of. Obviously this was going to be huge and worthy of investment.
I did that, made a good amount of money from Nvidia and later on ASML, AVGO... Of course I've made a fair few mistakes too. Nevertheless, my returns are much higher than market average.
Efficient pricing is cope. Fundamental analysis works just fine, your theses just have to be right and that's something that no amount of quant skills or training can teach.
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