The transition

Mr. Coffee said:
Iran has multiple advantages that we are in a poor position to overcome:
  1. They have more ballistic missiles left than we have interceptors left.
  2. Their location makes it inexpensive and low-effort for them to close the Strait of Hormuz.
  3. Geographically their whole country is a fortress where all plausible invasion routes are over mountain ranges with very thin road networks.
  4. They have lots of critical targets (mainly fossil fuel infrastructure in states currently allied to us) in easy drone range that we can't adequately protect.
  5. That same drone package would make any US invasion a slaughter. At least until we come up with effective anti-drone systems, doctrine, and adequate training.
  6. Iran's strategic objectives are clear and achievable. Ours are not.
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Looks like you gave Trump some things to think about; didn't think he would be an EBR reader.

US awards Raytheon $22.9 billion seven-year deal to boost Tomahawk output | Reuters https://share.google/EvRJCMNwfFHNKUaZl
 
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Chargeride said:
But still America could wipe Iran off the planet tomorrow, its only humanity that holds their hand.
Do we believe they would return the favour?
This goddam war of diety has been going on for 2000 years
The west fronts muscle.
They front burrowing into the fabric of belief.
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there is a god of war! I didn't believe it until I started reviewing conflicts and mysterious circumstances that prevented a stable objective achieved-" the kamikaze,the boatlift at Dunkirk,Lees not so bright battle at Gettysburg to name a few,the Nazis were committed to doing the dumbest things because if they had won there would have been a peace of sorts,the pieces have to remain in motion to satisfy "Ares",it goes and goes,it seems that at one point mankind should have come to their senses and cooperated rather then dominated.(YMMV)
 
Gionnirocket said:
I think you're misunderstanding where things need to go. Oil is pollution and causes of war with the mentally stuck of the world
Eliminate it first, let the middle east drown in it and sell what you have developed to the rest of the planet.
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I am only getting half the conversation on these things because I blocked view of one member.
 
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I like the story of Love, War, and Tech. Aphrodite (love) is married to Hephaestus (technology) and she has an affair with Aries (war). Hephaestus makes an invisible net that drops on them in bed. He traps them and takes them in their naked state to Olympus for all the Gods to laugh at. The simple innovative tech of the Ukrainians trumps other powers.
 
Roamers said:
Looks like you gave Trump some things to think about; didn't think he would be an EBR reader.

US awards Raytheon $22.9 billion seven-year deal to boost Tomahawk output | Reuters https://share.google/EvRJCMNwfFHNKUaZl
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Yes, so you are apparently expecting this stupid war to last seven years?

And the critical shortages aren't in Tomahawks anyway. We need THAAD and Patriot missiles yesterday. And probably SM missiles but the Navy isn't telling us that yet. None of which we ever had very many because they are all so expensive. And the math is brutal: if they have more missiles than we have interceptors, we lose.
 
www.csis.org

Rebuilding U.S. Missile Inventory: A Multiyear Project

High expenditure of key munitions in Operation Epic Fury has created a window of vulnerability until inventories return to pre-war levels and then reach levels that war planners desire.
www.csis.org www.csis.org

Look at Table 1, it spells it out clearly.

I'd point out that none of those numbers are reassuring from any practical standpoint. I find it unlikely that Iran is going to agree to pause operations until 2029, but we've given a lot of countries out there reason to not like us very much and they will see the opportunity to do us a mischief. Those numbers are also scary because the number of places that need decent air defense (including for our allies) has exploded so we are going to inevitably be splitting up that small number of missiles across a lot of locations.

This doesn't even include consideration that much of the Untied States is also vulnerable to drone attack. And we have zero capability even to detect such an attack and figure out where it came from, much less intercept it.

You also need to keep in mind that the gadgetry shown on that table is enormously expensive. THAAD and SM-6 missiles run about $10 million each. And we don't have a plausible cheaper replacement either.

It is also hard to keep those numbers secret, because we have an open process that determines how many are bought and when they are used OSINT people can easily count them. That's also why it is harder to keep track of Navy missiles because they can often be used in situations where civilians won't see them being used. We don't really know how many missiles were expended defending Diego Garcia, beyond "a lot".
 
Mr. Coffee said:
Yes, so you are apparently expecting this stupid war to last seven years?

And the critical shortages aren't in Tomahawks anyway. We need THAAD and Patriot missiles yesterday. And probably SM missiles but the Navy isn't telling us that yet. None of which we ever had very many because they are all so expensive. And the math is brutal: if they have more missiles than we have interceptors, we lose.
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Iran has been putting all its resources to building and stocking weapons and ammunitions underground for decades.
It will take years for the US to replenish its stock and even that will be no match for the accumulation Iran has.
They have stocks that can outlive any effort from the US for years to come.
 
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A few things about this:
  1. The cupboard is not totally bare. We have enormous quantities of SDBs (Small Diameter Bombs) and JDAMs, both of which are aircraft-delivered precision weapons. The critical shortage is in standoff weapons (like JASSMs) that we'd use against air defense sites. Similarly we have lots of GMLRs rockets that are shorter-range but launched by the same land-based platforms that can launch PrSMs.
  2. The numbers on air defense missiles (Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6) are really bad. Like for any realistic war against a near-peer nation like China we'd probably need five times as many missiles stockpiled as the (optimistic) targets in the above table show. We'd need even more if we were simultaneously fighting a war in the Middle East and trying to supply friends and allies as well. If we decided that the homeland needed defending too we'd need even more.
  3. THAAD and SM-6 are the most effective anti-ballistic missiles we have. They are also far and away the most expensive (e.g. about $10 million to $12 million each).
Supposedly there is an updated variant of the Patriot that uses modern microelectronics and is much less expensive (about $2 million per missile as opposed to $5 million for the current top-of-the-line version).

Missiles with solid rocket motors (all of the ones described above, as well as things like Javelins and Stinger missiles) have a finite shelf life before the rocket fuel degrades and no longer works (and sometimes just explode). Most of the Patriots we shipped to Ukraine were ones at the end of their service life so knowing the Ukrainians would likely be shooting those missiles saved us the money on safely disposing of them.

We don't really know how many ballistic weapons Iran has left, but it is safe to bet that it is far more than we have air defense missiles in-theater. The missiles that can hit targets in the Persian Gulf region are far more abundant than longer-range ones that can hit Diego Garcia. It is also safe to assume that the number of Shaheed drones they have and can make are far larger than what we can currently defend against.

Until we have effective anti-drone systems, an effective doctrine for using those systems, and people trained on the systems and the doctrine any of our people in the Gulf are just being used as targets. At this point the Ukrainians are closest having the whole package, and even they struggle in a lot of situations. So we have quite a bit of work to do.

I'd emphasize again that doctrine and training are just as important as hardware. You can have the world's greatest hardware and if you have crap doctrine and nobody trained on the weapons or the crap doctrine you will accomplish nothing but getting good kids killed for no reason.
 
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scrambler said:
And given he replaces all the competent people with incompetent yes men, this makes up for the cluster F...K. he put us in......
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The way I look at it, all of the people that were fired are likely to be trustworthy people to help us put things back together after the revolution.
 
Back on topic:

I was at the hospital in Wenatchee last week (no, I'm fine lolz) and there are a dozen level 2 EV chargers on two floors of the parking garage. When I got there at 9:30am all of them were ICEd out and unavailable to me.

ICEing an EV charger in Washington State is a traffic offense with a $124 fine. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.08.185

"ICEing" refers to parking a non-electric vehicle in a parking space reserved for electric vehicle charging.

Also don't get me started about monster trukks that park in "compact" spaces in parking garages. Jerks.
 
None of these are electric vehicles. How can I tell?

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Then there is this guy. We all know you never plug in an EV in the back seat:

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Something about monster trux that just makes them jerks:

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