Shrike
6hr ago
the threat of eliminating regional infrastructure that would cause humanitarian and global economic crisis.
I agree that knocking out regional oil infrastructure would, at least temporarily, worsen the quality of life of the world generally, but that doesn't "risk the world."
The Iraqis set fire to Kuwait's oil fields, and on a quick Google it looks like the damage was repaired in about 2 years. It seems unlikely that Iran will be able to hit Saudi oil infrastructure both horizontally and vertically (causing long term damage to all Saudi oil infrastructure) so they would focus on chokepoints like refineries and export terminals that would be expensive and difficult to repair or replace.
In your scenario we're basically looking at, potentially, severe but imperfect risk to about 30% of the world's production, which can be at least partially mitigated in the short term by reserves, in the medium term by repairs and production elsewhere, and over the long term by repairs and new construction. It's not going to end the world.
Is this a good reason not to attack Iran? It's definitely worth throwing into the hopper. Is it "risking the world"? Nah.
even if America is sacrificed as a result (especially if it is)
If Iran could somehow snap its fingers and delete oil production for the Middle East, it would plausibly strengthen the United States (as a massive oil producer with huge reserves) over the medium-long term.
Shrike
12hr ago
Imagine Iran arms itself and then takes control of Hormuz and says "don't intervene" with a nuclear backstop
Yeah, this is the sort of thing that worries me. I'm actually fairly optimistic about the idea of nuclear proliferation => stability, but Iran's put a lot of investment into proxy forces, and it seems possible that having a nuclear umbrella would actually embolden them to use them more aggressively, not less. They would be operating from a different starting position than, e.g., Poland, Belarus, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, etc.
Furthermore they've arguably demonstrated pretty persuasively that personal deterrence won't be effective on their upper echelons of leadership, which makes nuclear deterrence a bit shakier.
Shrike
12hr ago
now the story is Iran just hates us for no reason
The governing elements of Iran hate us for reasons that are ideological and have realpolitik interests contrary to ours. This isn't "no reason" - the USSR opposed the US under similar conditions. It's a very normal set of reasons for states to fall into conflict. Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that the US engaged in hostilities with Iran well before its invasion of Iraq.
we have to risk the world
How exactly is the world at risk from US operations with Iran? The US and Russia playing footsie over Ukraine is much more high-stakes and even then it's probably an exaggeration to say that "the world" is at stake.
Shrike
12hr ago
What ISR assets do you expect the USA to park right off shore of Iran
Passive SIGINT sensors, possibly ground-based radar, possibly sea surveillance capabilities like hydrophones.
that can't be flown in circles a comfortable few hundred km away?
I think this is a good intuition, and you might be right that there's little value from a sensing perspective. It's possible that the US can replicate any land-based assets there with air/space assets, but ground-based sensors aren't subject to the same deployment and maintenance constraints as aircraft, so it might be able to fill gaps in coverage. Similarly a hydrophone array deployed there would be able to run ~indefinitely, unlike helicopter-dropped sonarbuoys.
Shrike
12hr ago
Morally, if they're reasonable then the solution may be to solve the underlying issue.
There's not really any way to "solve" the issue of states having divergent interests, but "Iran exporting an ideology hostile to most of its neighbors" has caused a lot of grief and it's pretty clear that Israel is not the only regional power who wants them to stop. One might be tempted to suggest that removing their capacity to project power would solve the underlying issue.
Practically, if you don't have the ability to stop them by force (as Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider have amply demonstrated) then the easier solution is to pull the leash on the country you actually have some influence over.
After the operations you named, the Houthis agreed to stop attacking US vessels, and so far have not resumed (even though the United States is attacking Iran.) This might be a good argument that (US objectives having been achieved) the current strikes on Iran are a mistake, but it doesn't seem like a great argument that the US does not have the ability to influence Iranian/Houthi behavior by force, or that Iran's decision to arm proxies and support them in a blockade against neutral shipping was, in fact, a good idea.
Strange how this principle doesn't apply to those who wish to engage in neutral trade with Gaza.
Well, first off, Gaza is not a sovereign state. But secondly, even though it isn't, any country who wishes to go to war with Israel over it may do so.
Blockades interfering with neutral trade evidently are only an issue when they're imposed by the wrong countries.
Yes, that's how it works, more or less. Blockades impose a cost on neutral countries, and neutral countries may then decide if it serves their interests to use military force to attempt to set things right.
Woodrow Wilson never exercised his right to "defend free trade" when it was the Brits blockading Germany during the First World War either.
This is true in the narrow sense that Wilson didn't go to war over it, but he did raise a stink about it, and the British bent over backwards to make sure it didn't cause substantial financial distress to the United States and avoided killing Americans.
The US choices in that war were the Germans (unrestricted submarine warfare) and the British (will pay you for the cargo they confiscated). The US choices in this conflict are the Israelis (won't interfere with your shipping, unless maybe it's going to Gaza, which the United States does not recognize as a state) and the Iranians/Houthis (long track record of trying to shut down access to global waterways).
Shrike
15hr ago
Bombing people just makes them hate you more, they become less willing to surrender.
You were suggesting that this would work against Taiwan earlier this month.
This is where the issue appears - the US is not strong enough to do this without using H-bombs.
The United States would probably not struggle to turn off the majority of the power in Iran. I hope we don't, for humanitarian reasons, but we absolutely could. (The Russians have had considerable success doing this in Ukraine despite having less airpower and inferior targeting capabilities, while Ukraine also has better defenses and an open line of supplies from its border with the world's richest economies; Iran will not have this advantage) The target set isn't that big (about 600 power plants, if we trust Google AI.) The US production line supports upwards of 100 JDAMs kits per day, so without even expanding production, the USAF could in theory hit every power plant in Iran weekly without dipping into reserves.
This might not cause Iran to collapse into anarchy or overthrow the regime but it would pretty much turn them into a "failed state" in the sense that state capacity would plummet.
Shrike
16hr ago
Was that attack not 'reasonable' given we all known that shipping is important to both Israel and the US?
If it was reasonable, then it was reasonable for the United States to retaliate, as they did.
Plenty of things (the 9/11 attacks, Hitler's commando order, wiping out the dodo, overthrowing the Iranian government on behalf of Standard Oil) can be defended as 'reasonable' – but if I am allowed to think that the United States meddling in the affairs of the Iranian government 50 years ago is a bad idea because it its bad consequences, then I am allowed to think the same thing about Iran meddling in peaceful trade and otherwise irritating more powerful nations and causing a regional power bloc to form against them for ideological reasons.
You mention in your prior post American aid for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. You don't mention that Israel assisted Iran during that conflict. If it is reasonable for Iran to pursue a course of violence against the United States for assisting Iraq, is it also reasonable for Iran to pursue a course of violence against Israel after Israel assisted them?
You are defending a track record that has caused all of these bad things to happen.
Americans have had to protect their shipping since the very beginning of their nation, from the French, British, and Algerians during the era of the Founders, simply because they wished to engage in neutral trade with other nations unmolested.
And as flattering as it is for Americans to believe that everything revolves around them, they are not actually the Prime Mover. The truth is that Iran is engaged in a regional power struggle with its neighbors, many of which the United States has friendly relations with. And a very brief perusal of US involvement in the region will show that these regional power struggles create collateral losses for the United States. Because Iran is engaged in proxy warfare with the Saudis and Israel, we have no particular reason to believe that the US departure from the area would cause the regional crisis to cease, nor do we have a guarantee that Iran wouldn't do things such as blockade the Red Sea or Straits of Hormuz. In fact we know that Iran did this sort of thing in the past during their war with Iraq!
Your logic seems to be that this is all the poisoned fruit of the United States and UK meddling in Iran ~50 years ago. I think it's completely fair to criticize that decision, and to point out that it had bad consequences. But the United States did not make the only decision: Iran had its own set of decisions to make, some of them were poor ones, and that is why we are where we are.
We can think of an analogous decision, wherein we hold Germany responsible for the Holodomor because they assisted placing Lenin in power. Certainly that decision can be criticized! But so too can the mistakes and outright evil deeds perpetrated by the Soviets. It's absurd to give them no agency, and it's absurd to give the Iranians no say in their own actions.
Shrike
1d ago
it is the perfect example of showy tactical dominance that acomplishes zero strategic objectives.
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.
Shrike
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d ago
I think it's a pretty funny thing to do if you are tired of the US assassinating your leadership.
Shrike
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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.
I don't know that "Iran bad" really matters, does it? Iran is, like, a little bad, sure. You seem to want to boil this down to "Iran good/bad, US bad/good" – both countries have actually in real life done rotten things and the US or Iran being a better or worse country than the other doesn't mean that the way they have conducted themselves in these particular circumstances is wise. I don't really think it was wise of the US to meddle in Iran's government, that doesn't mean it was wise of Iran to poke the States.
Please note, for the record, that contrary to your suggestion, I've expressed skepticism about US military action against Iran. You've expressed skepticism about US "interest" as regards Iran's conduct and I am trying to explain the US interest to you (poorly, I guess.)
What would meet your threshold for unreasonable behavior? Lying to the IAEA about their past nuclear aspirations, thus undermining the JCPOA?
The truth is that two countries can both act fairly reasonably and come into conflict anyway.
What did Japan, Cyprus, Spain, South Korea, Panama, Greece, Liberia, Pakistan, India, the Bahamas, Romania, Denmark, the Maldives, or Singapore ever do to support Iraq?
I don't even think blockades are particularly evil – like, you're at war with Iraq, you've gotta do what you've gotta do – but are you insisting that Japanese-flagged ships in some moral sense deserve to be attacked by Iran? Or that, just because Iran has decided it will help it in its war if it attacks neutral shipping, that the neutral shipping just has to agree to that?
The United States did not in any sense make them attempt to procure nuclear weapons, lie to the IAEA about their attempts to procure nuclear weapons, fund Shiite proxy forces that attacked American servicemen in Iraq, attack American vessels, fund third parties that attacked American vessels, attempt to assassinate the President of the United States, assassinate Iranian exiles abroad, purge its own military, fund terrorist groups that take citizens of foreign countries hostage and/or murder them, kill large numbers of their own people, or generally give off such bad vibes that the Russians worked collaboratively with the Americans to prevent them from getting access to nuclear material and repeatedly refused to deliver advanced weapons they wanted access to.
Some of these decisions were worse than others from a practical standpoint, some of them were arguably pretty defensible, but they were all made by Iran.
I do agree that we should not have facilitated the rise of the Ayatollahs in Iran or done anything in 1953.
This isn't true at all, President Obama specifically acknowledged the 1953 coup and made clear steps to deescalate with Iran by getting involved in JCPOA in the first place.
Germany made a massive, horrific mistake sending Lenin in with millions in cash. Lenin promptly betrayed them, and if Germany had launched a proper invasion of Russia afterwards and removed him from power (as they considered doing, and as Lenin practically dared them to do) they would likely have prevented innumerable deaths in the USSR. It's deeply unfortunate that they did not.
Whether or not that situation is analogous to the US and Iran, I don't know. But the lesson from Lenin is "don't put an ideologue in power, and if you do, take him out while he is still weak or his troops will rape all of your daughters."
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