LordsFire
Internet Wizard
He literally just explained exactly that a couple posts ago.
Do you suffer from ADD?
peter Zeihan 2020
- Thread starter Cherico
- Start date
Do you suffer from ADD?
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
Can you show me where he laid out how the USA can end Iran as an entity tommorrow? All I see is standard wanking about American air power, which most certainly would not end Iran as an entity tommorrow.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
What, you think that Iran has advanced missile interception technology?
You think their air force is a credible deterrent to US air power? When the best combat aircraft they have is F-14s that we gave them fifty years ago?
I think that Tippy's post was a modicum over the top, but Iran is at best a third-rate power.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
It takes far more than bombing infrastructure to "end iran tommorrow"
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
And what kind of nation would exist if their power grid, water utlities, and primary industrial facilities were destroyed?
PeaceMaker 03
Well-known member
After an attack on a US carrier?
…. Declare war was n Iran.
Give international warning for 2 weeks to clear out of Iranian territory and waters and do not approach w/I 50 nautical miles.
Karg/ Karch island 90+% of Iran's oil flows through that point. Hit any PNG/ oil pipe lines out of Iran.
Attack every Kud force cell known, every group working with them, put bounties on every Iranian VIP and HVT. Blockade every port, sink any ship that comes or goes from Iran.
Destroy anything rail lines, and bridge.
Broadcast every day that Iranian people need to remove their leadership and it all stops.
Almost all Americans do not even conceive that the rest of the world's culture and mindset are not our mindset and culture.
They can not conceive a world that thinks “If I am strong I do not even think about being nice or kind to the weak people”.
Really we should be doing Radio America into Iran and letting them know what their Leaders are doing. Where their countries treasure is going, and what bank accounts their leaders have.
Yes we played wak a-Mole for 20 years, the real win for us was several generations of peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan had living proof that they did not have to live like they did, have the dictator or oligarchy run their country. A better life is possible….. If… If they build it.
That being the case it is ironic that non-military government entities like State Department did everything possible to keep from uplifting the people of those countries.
We did it in Germany and Japan and sure spent enough of our treasure to have done it.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
It would take months and months and months of intensive strikes to do that and quite frankly you dont have the munitions. You'd also be facing dronestrikes and asymmetrical attacks on your own forces.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
No, it would take hours of strikes to disable such systems.
It'd take months of strikes to reduce the entirety of the infrastructure to rubble, but you don't need to do that. You don't have to knock down every tower for a power line to go down, just one of them, and then send a follow-up strike when they actually manage to repair it however many days later.
At least, if you can actually reliably hit your targets, unlike the Russians.
Ever heard of operation Paul Bunyan?
Where we had nearly the entirety of the Pacific force on the Korean pen due to then killing 2 soldiers who went to chop a tree down.
Battleships off tje coast, carriers, 52s, Cobras, entirety of the Army in theater. Even RoK commandos with claymore strapped to them.
The One Char
Well-known member
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
We may be able to bomb Iran into the stone age but if Stone Age Iran refuses to surrender then Iran still exists and the US can't really do shit about that fact. Reasonable people can disagree on whether resistance would collapse or stiffen under the pressure of a bombing campaign such as was described earlier.
Poe
Well-known member
It's a figure of speech. Iran, as a plateau populated by Persians, would still exist. The current incarnation of Iran would not.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
Iran as an actor on the world stage would no longer exist, which I'm fairly sure is what Tippy meant with his post.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
Ah, but is that what AnimalNoodles was disputing?
(Going back to the claim, "the US could end Iran (for example) as an entity tomorrow with a relatively minimal effort", I would have serious questions about what "relatively minimal" means because it seems unlikely at first blush without going nuclear.)
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Poe
Well-known member
Again, its a regularly used figure of speech which implies total destruction of the current government. You and he are being pedantic and arguing semantics.
Relatively minimal in this case basically means the President issuing orders and various US military platforms doing relatively routine things to carry those orders out.
Fundamentally, a modern nation requires electricity. It requires telecommunications. It requires gasoline and diesel. It requires a whole host of industrial and transport infrastructure.
All of those things are relatively time intensive and expensive to build, are generally not fortified, are fixed targets, and can't be replaced rapidly or easily.
Take France for example, it has less than 90 nuclear power plants. Even if you decide not to target the nuke plants it is fairly trivial to target the high tension power lines that move power from those plants to everywhere else, and just as easy to target the substations and transformers that are needed to get that power to the end users. Seriously, take out a few hundred targets and France goes (generally) dark for weeks to months even if you do nothing else. With sustained effort you can make it effectively impossible to get repairs done basically ever. Most nations have (at best) a handful of ports that are able to accept cargo at scale and a hand full of critical rail lines. Put a bunker buster into a mountain pass, for example, and you can shut down the rail line that goes through that pass for weeks to months. Or take out a few bridges. Hit the major off loading facilities and infrastructure at a port (a relative handful of cranes, for example) and you can cut a nations ability to import anything by at least 90% basically instantly and that will be the case for months.
Drop bunker busters on the right locations and you can cut the water mains into a city and essentially cut off municipal water to an entire metro area for days to weeks.
For most nations, the internet can be taken down with strikes on a few critical nodes. Or at least degraded to an incredible degree.
Now do all of this in coordination with the use of large scale cyberwarfare. What is essentially ransomware hitting basically every connected computer system in the nation, for example.
And in coordination with the US Navy notifying the world that the USN will sink any vessel traveling too or from the targeted nations ports and shooting down any airplane flying in that nations air space.
Simultaneous with all of this are the precision guided munitions targeted on essentially every potential unity figure in the nation. Securing El Presidente might be a bit hard but dropping bombs on the bedrooms of basically every Deputy X, Colonel, Mayor, Police Chief, business leader, etc. at 3 AM local and in coordination with the infrastructure strikes? That's fairly trivial and it destroys any real hope of coordination or unity.
Ending the ability of a government to exercise control over its territory and preventing the ability of any kind of large scale coordination is fairly trivial. And then you just wait while putting up what is effectively a blockade and dropping a bomb on anything that looks like it might be a good target. After that you wait a month or so for civilizational collapse to take care of the problem nation for you.
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It's like the China problem. The US doesn't need to send a single ground troop into China to destroy its ability to survive. The US already knows the location of basically every power plant, transportation hub, and factory in the entire nation. The USN captures or sinks every ocean going vessel moving too or from China, which basically instantly cuts off essentially all of the raw materials needed to keep China alive. The power in every major city in China goes out. And then the US waits while lobbing cruise missiles at factory after factory in a steady cadence. If China goes nuclear then the US also does and the Chinese population drops to under a hundred or so million in about an hour. If China doesn't go nuclear then the government has to focus all of its bandwidth on internal stabilization and its own survival while China has also ceased to be of any great relevance on the world stage.
Global depression? Sure. For a year or two while the US builds out its industrial plant on a crash priority, wartime, basis and then things are mostly resolved.
Geopolitical consequences? Well yes, the US did just basically end one of the worlds great nations with relatively trivial ease. But then, for the US those consequences are again relatively light.
The US can't properly conquer, occupy, or integrate most any nation in the world and certainly not rapidly. But conquest and occupation are very different from neutralization and destruction.
And if Europe really wants to replace the US it needs that level of capability.
strunkenwhite
Well-known member
Doesn't really sound too routine to me but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd rather let you have it than try to argue the point within the confines of this thread. Till next time.
I'd rather let you have it than try to argue the point within the confines of this thread. Till next time.
China is not in the top 10 land buyers, lots of states have put laws against them buying land, any Chinese assets will get chopped up and parceled out to US companies if a war happens:
Prince Ire
Section XIII
It also rests on the bizarre assumption that China would just sit there doing nothing while being attacked and completely brushes off the possibility of China launching nuclear weapons which apparently wouldn't affect the US at all.
AnimalNoodles
Well-known member
Not to mention the simple fact that the USA does not have nearly the munitions it needs or the productive capacity for such an immense project.