Shrike
7hr ago
Was Iran in violation of the JCPOA prior to Trump pulling out?
My understanding is that Iran was technically in breach of JCPOA from the moment they signed it by failing to disclose their prior military-related nuclear activities, which they did not.
There is a trend I'm noticing where all of the "good" arguments for the war in Iran would also have applied to the war in Iraq.
As I think I've said in here before, Iraq is remembered as a "bad" war because the US tried to nation-build. The US conducted multiple punitive attacks under Reagan and Clinton (including operations against Iran) and George H.W. Bush drove Iraq out of Kuwait in a major regional war and while people sometimes criticize them on principle nobody suggests they were the massive blunder Iraq was. This doesn't necessarily mean that a punitive expedition into Iraq was a mistake, and what we are doing in Iran might also be a mistake, but if we just blow up all of their stuff and leave without taking major strategic losses it's unlikely it will be a mistake in the same category as Iraq.
Shrike
8hr ago
They never had a nuclear weapons program. That is not a real thing. No expert has alleged that.
This is trivially false. From Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:
The documents that the Belfer group were shown confirm that senior Iranian officials had decided in the late 1990s to actually manufacture nuclear weapons and carry out an underground nuclear test; that Iran’s program to do so made more technical progress than had previously been understood; and that Iran had help from quite a number of foreign scientists, and access to several foreign nuclear weapon designs. The archive also leaves open a wide range of questions, including what plan, if any, Iran has had with respect to nuclear weapons in the nearly 16 years since Iran’s government ordered a halt to most of the program in late 2003.
Or, if that's not neutral enough for you, from the IAEA:
Information available to the Agency prior to November 2011 indicated that Iran had arranged, via a number of different and evolving management structures, for activities to be undertaken in support of a possible military dimension to its nuclear programme. According to this information, the organisational structures covered most of the areas of activity relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.
You can read the entire report full of details of exactly what actions Iran took in support of the nuclear program they denied having. It's honestly pretty cool James Bond stuff:
Information available to the Agency in 2011 also indicated that Iran could have benefitted from the aforementioned foreign expert, who had knowledge of both MPI technology and experimental diagnostics and had worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon programme in his country of origin. The foreign expert’s presence in Iran in the period 1996-2001 has been confirmed by Iran, although it stated that his activities were related to the production of nanodiamonds.
And it is true that the IAEA very measuredly declines to say that Iran's program is ongoing, pointing to historical evidence rather than more recent evidence. But their report strongly suggests that Iran did, historically, have a nascent nuclear weapons program:
The Agency’s overall assessment is that a range of activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device were conducted in Iran prior to the end of 2003 as a coordinated effort, and some activities took place after 2003.
Shrike
8hr ago
what a reasonable Iranian response to these events would have looked like
Do you think attacking the merchant ships of third party nations either directly or via proxies is "reasonable?"
what the actual interests of the US is in the region
Wouldn't you agree that, at a minimum, the US has an interest in preventing people from attacking US merchant and naval vessels and that to the extent that Iran supports and assists the Houthis the US has an interest in preventing such future support and aid?
I'm pretty much in favor of a realistic and restrained foreign policy and have concerns about this war but even the most pacifistic and isolationist American presidents have sent the Navy to blow up the things of people who messed with our shipping and they were correct to do so.
Like, if the Iranian government doesn't fall in the next three weeks, and if it isn't replaced with a regime that is anti-China, Russia and North Korea but also pro-Israel, what is the gain?
Destroying Iran's capability to effectively wage a conventional war while also forging a regional anti-Iranian coalition comprised of everyone Iran shot ballistic missiles at seems like a benefit, particularly if the United States would benefit from withdrawing its force presence in the Middle East but is unwilling to do so while hostile actors might target US regional friends, US shipping, etc.
I have my doubts that things will play out this neatly but if we actually thwap Iran and Israel can play nice with all of its new friends we might actually get something like regional peace and perhaps the US can even more or less stop playing in the sandbox, maybe.
Even if that doesn't happen, it will likely give the US greater freedom in the future from a force allocation/contingency planning perspective.
Shrike
8hr ago
this makes me confident that the war is going very badly
A US war going "very badly" with a power like Iran looks like losing a carrier, or an air wing, or multiple surface ships. All of which could still potentially happen (surface ships are pretty vulnerable to mines in particular).
Remember that the US has had several ships severely damaged in past operations in the Gulf (USS Samuel B. Roberts, USS Princeton, USS Stark) and lost a number of aircraft in the Persian Gulf War. Those sorts of losses are table stakes for a big war like this and the fact that the US hasn't seemed to lose a single aircraft to Iranian fire indicates that the war is going better from a purely military point of view than e.g. the Persian Gulf war.
Shrike
13hr ago
Iran isn't indiscriminately attacking ships. So, e.g., Chinese vessels have been able to transit without being attacked.
This means the global economic impact will be much less severe than if the Strait was actually closed (for instance with uncharted mines).
Shrike
21hr ago
sees a poll in the mail
This isn't how all modern polling is done, FYI. My understanding is that a lot of modern polling is compensated, and done online.
I am the only person in the world who thinks this kind of polling must be insanely inaccurate
We know most modern polling isn't insanely inaccurate because we can track the polling from the past few presidential cycles. Plenty of major polls are off enough to matter, but in knife-fight presidential campaigns a tenth of a percent matters, and because of the Electoral College, gen-pop polling isn't necessarily helpful as to who will win the election. But once you start seeing polls that say "80% X" you generally shouldn't be thinking "well the numbers are actually flipped it's just that they are mostly polling the 20%."
What you should do is look carefully at their sampling methodology and how they phrased the question(s).
Shrike
1d ago
I can understand disliking The Return on the grounds that it is arguably even weirder and/or "differently vibed" than the original show but I'm still glad it got made. "THIS IS WHAT WE DO IN THE FBI" cracks me up every time I think of it.
Shrike
1d ago
I think it's a pretty funny thing to do if you are tired of the US assassinating your leadership.
Shrike
3d ago
But there's a huge range of carrier landings (night, storm, low fuel) and a huge range of enemy fire (small arms, dog fight machine gun, SAM). I'm certain that an F8 landing on a carrier in a storm would be more stressful than the same pilot being shot at by an AK47 while on mission.
I haven't personally talked to anyone who could compare it to getting shot at. What I have heard firsthand is that night landings specifically are very stressful.
I'd love to see a source for the following claim
I was first exposed to it in the short Navy/Grumman recruiting piece/documentary "Sea Legs" which you'd probably enjoy (and isn't very long).
On a quick Google, you can also see it referenced here. Relevant excerpt:
During the Vietnam War, Hubbard said, researchers attached sensors to pilots’ bodies to see when they experienced the most anxiety during night missions over North Vietnam.
The highest readings were not when the pilots braved ground-to-air missiles or flew in areas patrolled by enemy aircraft. The greatest stress was when the pilots came home and tried to snag that cable.
I suspect part of the thing at play here might be that someone shooting a missile at you is both reasonably unexpected and something that is over fairly quickly – like a near-accident while driving. Landing on a carrier is something that you can anticipate (including, with reasonable precision, if it is going to be in e.g. low light conditions) and so you have more time to dread it.
Overall I agree with everything you said.
Good to know, because you'd know better than me!
Shrike
3d ago
Ideas like Elan, Warrior Spirit, and Bushido seem to be total bullshit in modern war.
FWIW, I don't think this is exactly true, or at least I want to pick it apart a little. (Apologies in advance for the long tangent to your very interesting review, which I appreciate.)
At a minimum, I think physical courage is still important. However, I think that coolness under fire is an extremely important but less visible part of the virtue of courage, and recklessness has diminishing value in a modern war, while coolness has increasing value.
A sort of seemingly reckless courage could be pretty valuable in physical combat when rushing at someone with a pointed object could cause them to break and flee (this is why Surovov trained his troops on bayonet drills: at the time, troops rarely broke from gunfire alone, but bayonet charges usually resulted in one side or the other breaking before the lines made contact). However in modern warfare, instead of bayonets being "step 2" of a battle, they are more like "step 50" and the battle is usually decided before that point. Particularly in the naval and air category, reckless courage is not likely to "scare" the enemy due to the interpersonal nature of the conflict (although you might successfully bluff them), and it's likely to cause you to make a mistake while you are operating a complex piece of machinery. Whereas if you get rattled while operating a complex piece of machinery, you're going to operate less effectively.
Interestingly, naval air operations you mention in the book likely required more psychological resilience or courage than modern air combat (this is based on studies done during IIRC the Vietnam War that found that carrier landings caused more stress than taking enemy fire). So coolness is essential and being reckless means you'll wash out of the flight program or worse.
But coolness is less obvious an aspect of courage than conspicuous risk-taking. (Or, to put it another way, if you're in naval air operations or a submariner, the conspicuous risk-taking is already "baked in" - you're landing a plane on a boat! You're in a boat under the water!!)
I do think elan still has a place today. Something like the Maduro capture operation requires a certain amount of elan (literally, that means "dash," doesn't it?) and willingness to expose oneself to potentially hostile fire, and in certain circumstances (such as house-to-house combat) what seems like reckless courage can rise in value again: the guy who will actually charge you with a fixed bayonet in a crowded space may prevail against a dozen enemies where a more hesitant approach would fail.
I don't think "coolness" and "elan" are really opposites. (For instance, Taffy 3's actions off Samar I think seem like a good example of elan, but it also seems to me that it demonstrated considerable coolness under fire – but I'd be curious for your thoughts, since you're the one who's been reading the history, although I guess I'll have to wait until you read the next book?) I do think truly reckless bravery is simpler and perhaps more difficult than coolness under fire, because the latter requires more judgment. I think it's good that the idea of elan is still around, particularly in infantry units that are more likely to need to tap into that sort of tradition. I don't think elan is a replacement for strategy, doctrine, or proficiency – you cannot just decide that your collective path to victory is predicated on will alone. But sometimes it can be decisive for individuals. And I think the ideal warrior spirit would capture the essence of both, with the understand that sometimes right judgment might lead one to act with elan.
Shrike
3d ago
Yeah I am disappointed that they don't seem interested in putting reactors in. I guess there are good reasons, with the new propulsion methods, not to do that, but it makes sense to me to have a class of nuclear-powered cruiser escorts designed to accompany carriers. And if railguns and/or lasers Become Real, it would be simple enough to reload their munitions at sea.
(You can reload VLS cells at sea anyway, it's just painful, but a larger ship would probably be able to do that regardless if you wanted it to.)
Shrike
3d ago
Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship.
My understanding that an issue we are currently hitting with the Burke class is that we basically kept throwing new systems on there (we also increased the size of the ship over time, the first ships in the class didn't even have a helicopter hangar) until we basically tapped out the potential.
Shrike
3d ago
This also explains the protracted and expensive development of the F-35 and the decision of the DoD to put all of their chips on it: they were very confident the secret sauce would work, whatever it was!
Shrike
3d ago
The Russians also designated their carriers "aircraft carrying cruisers" due to the Montreux Convention, which is pretty funny, although in fairness the Soviets put substantial anti-ship armament on said ships.
Shrike
3d ago
Lockheed Martin be like "okay but how do we market...what kind of countermeasure was it again?"
Shrike
3d ago
I think a lot of people were claiming it had fewer VLS per tonnage than anticipated, but I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some degree of "right-sizing" before it's executed.
If the Navy can get a railgun to really work the firepower will be terrifying.
Shrike
3d ago
Zumwalt
Man I always complete forget that the Zumwalt exists. Pretty fair to compare them to the Tico, I think, so that is at least a halfway good counterexample and probably a decent illustration of @Lizzardspawn's point.
Although it kinda seems like we should class them as a monitor, given their intended function.
Shrike
3d ago
I think there's also a habit in some places to classify larger ships that would generally be termed "destroyer" due to their anti-air and/or anti-submarine capabilities as "frigates" because that sounds less scary.
At the risk of dramatic oversimplification, I think in modern parlance (at least in the west) there's been a tendency to use "frigate, destroyer" and perhaps "cruiser" to mean "small, medium, and large" because the trend is for ~all ships to have at least limited multirole capabilities. Unless someone was calling something a "frigate" to be politically correct, I cannot think of any ships in the recent past labeled frigates that were designed to be larger than the contemporary destroyers in their own fleet, and likewise the cruisers have always been larger than contemporary destroyers.
Shrike
4d ago
If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality.
Bouncing off of this idea, I'd also suggest that religion actually does a sort of neat trick when it comes to making science "work" because pure rationality has a hard time really getting out of the solipsism trap, but even if you manage that, science in particular is vulnerable to the problem of inductive reasoning. Having a (reasonable, not irrational) faith that the universe is created by an orderly Being really makes science fall into place easily, since it provides a reason why the universe would be ordered the way that it is.
Obviously that's not the only way to get to believing in an understandable universe, and I am not saying "science is impossible without God," but other ways to do this end up having to take something on faith. And even handwaving the problem of solipsism and assuming the observable world is in some sense real, using scientific reasoning to prove its own validity end up having to argue that we can adequately perceive truth because it's evolutionary advantageous for us to do so, or that "truth just means what works" – a pragmatic approach. Which is all very well and good, but seems (at least to me) mostly to lead back around to pointing towards religion, which "works," pragmatically speaking, and if humans evolved to seek out the truth because it is evolutionarily advantageous, and religion is both something humans have a natural instinct for and something that seems evolutionary advantageous...well, you can do the math.
On that note, I would suggest that freeing science and reason from the fairly tedious business of "proving that we exist and that reality is real" (which, it seems to me, has really bogged down philosophy for a few hundred years) really unleashes them to do their best work.
Shrike
4d ago
It seems like a bargaining chip. Taking it away from Iran and offering to give it back gives them more of a positive motivation to end the war than just bombing it.
Also, getting them to fixate on whacking Marines on Kharg would redirect their munitions away from more high-value targets.
Finally, it would allow them to test some of the tactics the Marines have been pivoting towards which focus on the need for the Marines to be able to operate within hostile missile range.
Shrike
4d ago
The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer.
This is a bit misleading. A lot of the ways that religion benefits individuals has a positive social effect. Off the top of my head, so I might mess a couple of these up, but regular religious practice tends to be correlated with increased fertility, increased fostering/adopting, decreased crime/recidivism, increased mental health, increased physical health, longer, happier marriages, and an increased history of charitable donations and/or volunteer work.
All of these have positive benefits for society as a whole that ripple beyond the believer.
On the flip side, we've seen that an decline of religious faith seems to generate a bunch of "nones" who don't really gain the supposed benefits of irreligiosity (they still often believe in ghosts, or God, or astrology, or whatever) but they miss out on the very real benefits of regular religious practice.
However, it's also worth pointing out that the benefits of mere religious belief are weak. Where you see these tangible benefits of religion is in people who practice it. (This isn't, like, a cheeky tautological statement, it's more that if you want to see the above effect in scientific research you want to look for e.g. frequent religious attendance rather than merely identifying with a faith tradition.)
Now, I am speaking here of the United States. It's entirely possible that things are different somewhere else.
(Interestingly, as I understand it, there's at least some research that suggests at least some of these health benefits conferred by religious belief only benefit the believer in a religious environment, and that stripping the broader religious culture removes some of those benefits. From a utilitarian analysis, I suppose this has harsh implications for people who try to remove that religious culture. But I'm not sure if I trust a what's likely a vibecoded gravestone analysis to get that right.)
Shrike
4d ago
law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit.
I think this is correct. But I am not sure it is entirely a feature of modern society alone, I am given to understand that older civilizations also managed to generate sprawling legal codes. It seems like an inherent risk of "writing" + "non-expiring laws."
and the DHS is talking about deporting a number equal to all non white people
This was an interesting claim, so I clicked. The post says "America after 100 million deportations" which is a bit shy of the 150 million nonwhites in the States. It's also a bit more than the estimated 10ish illegal immigrants. One must imagine the white supremacist DHS poster to be mathematically challenged.
I don't think this is true. If Iran wants to keep Kharg Island, and we take it, then it allows us to bargain for a post-war outcome that is more beneficial to us. Assuming we intend to negotiate with the regime at some point, which it seems likely that we do, it's only a stupid play if we gain less value out of holding the island than the costs we incur to take it. (Which might in fact be the case, and I would be interested in such an argument, but you do not present one here.)
It also potentially allows the US to push ISR assets up closer to Iran's borders and deny Iran use of whatever assets they have there.
Finally, assuming the Iranians will have a fairly normal response to having their land taken and try to either get it back or retaliate, it could bait them into make foolish decisions or even just divert their targeting away from US/allied/random third party assets. This is also beneficial to the United States.
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