The US is fighting a 21st Century war with a 20th Century military
I’m a visual thinker, so I just put this “active vs. passive defense” info-meme together. No A.I. was used. The images are from the internet, the text is mine.
We’re fighting this war on the other side of the planet, and our personnel and extremely expensive and difficult to replace assets are sitting exposed above ground. Iran is fighting on its home turf, using its geography to great advantage.
Iran is six times bigger than Colorado, with significantly higher mountains (up to 18,000 feet). Tunneling into solid granite is something Iranian engineers mastered decades ago. Locating and striking a tunnel entrance with a multi-million-dollar standoff weapon does little to nothing to stop Iran from launching their ballistic missiles. These “missile cities” are built like gopher towns, with many entrances. Earthmoving equipment is on standby to clear temporarily blocked entrances, while the others remain operational.
Our 20th Century Navy and Air Force are confronting 21st Century warfighting realities, and they are not prepared. Our current force structure was perfect for [A] enriching the MIC and their political backers and [B] beating the snot out of banana republics as a demonstration of our power projection ability. But now Iran is backing us down, and they are spending only a tiny fraction of the US military budget.
Note that our 20th Century air force flies at one-tenth the speed of Iran’s hypersonic missiles, and our combat jets carry crews, while Iran’s missiles are obviously unmanned. In today’s “casualty-averse” American political environment, this means our aircraft can only approach the borders of Iran to launch our diminishing supply of costly standoff weapons, lest our planes be shot down over Iranian territory.
This stands in sharp contrast to previous wars, such as Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq, where our bombers roamed hostile skies at will, unafraid of ground fire.
And we face a similar problem at sea, as the recent Iranian “test” of a steerable anti-ship ballistic missile that overflew the CVN George Washington demonstrates. Ballistic missiles that can be guided in flight and during their terminal dive in order to strike a moving ship threaten to render our navy obsolete.
This will be a paradigm change on the order of battleships being sunk by land-based bombers during World War Two. Specifically, the sinking of the British battleships the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, on December 10th of 1941. They were attacked and sunk by land-based Japanese “Betty” bombers after departing Singapore.
But just imagine what a porcupine America could become, on a tenth our current military budget, if we quit playing the global hegemon and sole superpower, even as our economy enters its terminal phase and the global American empire fades away.
Iran has popped the bubble of the facade of American military supremacy, for a tiny fraction of the cost that we’ve squandered on our recurring “forever wars,” which impoverish ordinary Americans even while they further enrich the Epstein Class.
We’ve already been driven out of the Persian Gulf, and our top military brass are admitting in public that we will probably never return to rebuild our wrecked bases. And Iran has flatly declared that no US warships will ever sail through the Strait of Hormuz again. That is, for Iran, an absolute and unalterable redline. The billion-dollar long-range radars and massive satellite uplink dishes that Iran destroyed with $30,000 Shahed drones cannot be flown in on C-17s, and Iran will not allow foreign ships full of war materiel to enter the Persian Gulf.
Meanwhile, our delusional president posts his own fantasies, which are totally detached from reality. Now, our warships must be resupplied from distant Diego Garcia, instead of from Bahrain, a clear loss. Destroyers must go off the blockade line for a week at a time to sail to Diego Garcia to reload with missiles.
How many of these US bases will be manned and operational when the war is finally over? On September 8th Iran fired barrages of missiles at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. There have been significant casualties reported. Will we keep our planes there? Or will they all be moved further back to Israel, or even to Cyprus?
Is this what winning looks like, being pushed backward, far away from the country that we sneak-attacked on February 28?
Operation Epic Fury, AKA Operation Epstein Fiasco, clearly marks the end of an era. I just hope we learn the lessons before Iran gets lucky with a “ship killer” guided ballistic missile. And as far as the defense of American interests in the Western Pacific, well, we can just take that off the table, the way we took the CVN George Washington away from Japan to replace the worn-out Lincoln and its crew.
If America cannot subdue 2nd-tier Iran, (even while expending most of our extremely expensive and difficult to replace interceptors and standoff weapons), we can forget about facing China in a sea and air battle to defend Taiwan, Japan or South Korea. Or for that matter even Guam, the most important America military base located in the “Second Island Chain,” 3,000 kilometers from mainland China.
Bracken—Out.
