I think Clearmotion has a very interesting technology and product (ride stabilization), but let's paint a full picture here: the company was founded in 2009, took on $370 million in funding, and only recently landed large contracts (a $1 billion dollar deal in 2023 with Chinese auto manufacturer, Nio).
I'm sure they were in a constant struggle for survival and had to "move fast" to stay afloat, but their technology is more than a decade in the making.
I would venture a guess that there is little interest in adding complexity to the humble shock absorber. A simple passive mechanical system is replaced with a complex servomechanism featuring sensors and actuators which live a hard life under a car.
What is the longevity vs a passive system? How much is it to service vs standard suspension? How much does this change the overall suspension design? How much weight does it add? I bet the answers to those questions since 2009 were not at all enticing to automotive designers or bean counters.
Personally, I would not want such a system on my car. It sounds like another expensive maintenance item you have to deal with that adds little or no value.
I worked on deep sub-micron, full custom mixed-signal integrated circuits for more than a decade, and I can't pass the first level.
> Wire an NMOS transistor so that when In is 1, the output is pulled to ground (0). When In is 0, the output should be unconnected (Z).
Certainly:
(a) The nMOS has 3 connections: its drain is only connected to the output (no +Vdd supply), it's source is tied to ground, it's gate is tied to the signal input
(b) When the gate (input) is driven high, the nMOS transistor turns "on," connecting the output to the source (which is grounded). This acts as a "pull-down network"
(c) When the gate is driven low, the nMOS turns "off," leaving no connection to the output. This is equivalent to a "high-impedance" / "unconnected" / "Z" output
Fails 1/2 tests
(Edit) - I thought the light grey, thick line on the background grid was a wire from "input" to the transistor's gate. It is not. You need to explicitly add a wire from "input" to gate :\
I solved it but I had to use 'two' NMOS transistors unlike the direction.
Wire an NMOS transistor so that when In is 1, the output is pulled to ground (0). When In is 0, the output should be unconnected (Z).
The way it's worded it sounds like you need 'an NMOS' ie a single one? So I messed around but then I remembered seeing gates made from two transistors in my dusty memory.
(edit) I see there _is_ a one transistor solution... I'm pretty sure I tried that though. :/
lol, mb. As in understand it, its that the colors of the bg make it seem like its wires when its not, I'll change the color theme a bit to fix (plz correct me if my understanding is wrong)
Yes, that's the issue: the (thick) solid grey "major axis" lines on the background seemed to be a wire.
If I could make a recommendation, get rid of the grid lines entirely and only have 'dots' at regular spacing. Here's what Cadence Virtuoso looks like (the most popular circuit schematic tool for integrated circuit design):
the part that tripped me up is 0 showing in deep RED and I thought that meant I was doing something wrong. I came here, read this and realized I was actually right and then pressed the Run tests button and passed. This is a UX thing you'd want to address
During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement. At the time, Baghdad was known to have the highest density of SAM protection out of any city in the world.
An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
> A second Air Force combat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf region on Friday, and the lone pilot was safely rescued, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The A-10 Warthog attack plane went down near the Strait of Hormuz about the same time that an Air Force F-15E was shot down over Iran, the officials said. In that incident, one crew member was rescued and search-and-rescue operators are looking for the second airman. Officials provided scant details about the A-10 crash, including how and where it happened.
there's some additional osint rumor mill that a blackhawk helicopter involved in rescue operations was also shot down but claims that crew been recovered
On top of these cases there is all of the aircraft that has been destroyed while grounded. The high tech AWACS getting blown up was a big hit, among others. The losses are likely much worse than we know since the military has been trying to keep a lid on most of them.
Not to mention the multiple THAAD radars taken offline. Those are $500M assets - and only 8 exist in the world. 24,000 precise transceivers all liquid cooled… not available on Amazon for next day deliver either.
a single AN/FPS-132 radar costs $1.1 bln, not $500m. And Iran stuck 17 of the CENCCOM sites hosting radars of all kinds across Qarar, Bahrain, Iraq, UAE, Saudi, Jordan, Israel, etc).
Total cost is so much bigger, it is staggering. The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.
in addition to cost, they all require Rare Earth Minerals, and China has banned the export of these (they own like 99% of the market).
So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available
Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions
>So not only CENTCOM is blind and incurred damage in high single digit billions, but also will be unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades) even if the funding were made to be available
not just what i quoted, but your source does not say any of what you are saying.
your source says: Satellite images show damage near vital equipment on sites in at least five countrieshttps://archive.ph/QHNXW
If we are speaking of interception/penetration, these are also solved by Iran using several strategies that Israel/CENTCOM did not expect:
1. use of cluster munitions
2. exhaustion of expensive interceptor inventory (exchanging $7000 shahed drone for $3-5 mln worth of PAC-3 interceptors)
3. Use of penetration aids
4. Changing trajectory at the terminal stage
5. coordinating swarm attacks (let AD to intercept SRBMs, while the real damage is caused by abundant cheap Shaheds that fly too slow and low to be detected)
Both you and the Guardian are confused (or perhaps the Guardian is just trying to ride the popular understanding of the "Iron Dome" as a super catch all missile defense system vs reality). The Iron Dome has nothing to do with shooting down ballistic missiles. The Iron Dome isn't designed to target ballistic missiles: it targets short-range rockets and artillery like the ones fired by Hamas and Hezbollah, and has been modified to also target slow-moving drones (although the Iron Beam is intended to be the main drone defense system in the future). The Iranian missiles are targeted by different systems: David's Sling and the Arrow 2 and 3.
The Iron Dome does not depend on the American radar system in Qatar that Iran hit. It would be crazy for it to do so when it only targets short range attacks. If someone is telling you that the "Iron Dome is blind" because an American radar in Qatar got hit by a missile, you should probably update the amount you trust that source negatively, since not only is that not true, but it doesn't even pass the sniff test to anyone who knows what the Iron Dome is.
> The Iron Dome has nothing to do with shooting down ballistic missiles
This is not true, Tamir interceptors have been upgraded to target ballistic missiles. It is extremely visible when this happens, as the interceptors fly a very different path than usually.
you are arguing semantics, both me and Guardian using the term "iron dome" as a collective of all air defense systems in Israel (not that one system built to counter cheap rockets), because all these systems are integrated into one military network, including the GCC/CENTCOM radars that were destroyed.
if you replace "iron dome" with "air defense network" everything else would still be true
The problem is you do not understand how these systems work and are making claims that don't pass the sniff test to anyone who does know how these work. For example, you claim multiple times that Shahed drones have somehow exacerbated these Iron Dome missile interceptor issues, and now claim you're not talking about the literal Iron Dome — you're talking about who knows what (you don't specify any actual, concrete system and instead use a metaphorical understanding from the popular press). The problem is: actually, the literal, real Iron Dome does target Shaheds! So if it's the radar system that was the problem and caused the metaphorical Iron Dome to be "blind" — why did drones matter, if those are targeted by the literal Iron Dome that doesn't use that radar? Are you meaning to talk about David's Sling, which targets missiles and drones? But David's Sling is a medium range system that doesn't use the American radar in Qatar either! Arrow 3? Guess what — it has nothing to do with Shaheds, and has nothing to do with the American radar system either — it uses an IAI radar system.
The Iranian hit on the American radar in Qatar hasn't left the "Iron Dome" blind, figuratively or literally, and your proposed mechanisms of actions don't make sense.
you have constructed a strawman argument and are arguing with it, mostly semantics and splitting hairs.
Perhaps a problem here is that we are mixing up two theatres: Israel and GCC.
Iron dome exists in Israel, but the radars and air defense network was degraded in GCC, it is these patriots there that are having interceptor issues and shahed drone issues.
Israel is not being bombed by shaheds, it is being bombed by ballistic missiles that they are having problems intercepting and alerting population in advance.
you can check with the sourc elinks I provided that confirm that the radars in GCC were part of the early warning system for israel, and hitting radars in Qatar has impacted directly AD network in israel (reduced alert time significantly)
None of your links support that claim or even try to make it. The Haaretz article is complaining about a day of unusually short missile notifications on March 7, a week later than the Iranian strike on the radar (and now a month-old claim, which lasted only a day — if that was due to the radar, why did it not start the day the radar was actually hit, and why did it only last a day when the radar remains ruined today?). One of your articles is about drones, which has nothing to do with the radar system, and you are now backpedaling all of your drone-related claims for Israeli air defense despite making many drone claims earlier (why is that?). The other is the Guardian article that doesn't make that claim, and one is about the American Patriot missile defense system, not Israeli ones.
Recent reporting has indicated that contrary to your claim that the American radar system getting hit has left the Iron Dome "blind," Israeli missile detection has actually improved over the course of the war:
ohh, they use AI... this sounds like a YC startup pitch, I bet they also use AI agents and Claude Code to improve air defense...
then why all these radars were even needed in the first place? why did US taxpayers spent billions procuring installing and maintaining these radars, if simpel fine-tuning with Claude Code would work just as well ??
Well, I see you've graduated from wishcasting the Iron Dome being "blinded" by a radar it doesn't use to being confused that shooting down missiles involves AI.
Depending on what you call AI, AI has been used for targeting for awhile. It's just usually called 'automated control' or something. This is more a re-categorizing of targeting algorithsm, and calling it AI.
not sure you are aware that you pass for the ignorant who's stuck in denial of reality.
you are arguing against official annoucements from the IDF explaning why the civilian alert system now only gives short notice and will do so from now on, and you argue on the basis of fallacious rhetoric.
"I am morally correct therefore I need not be factually correct".
Stop doing this: it completely undermines the political argument because it makes it clear you are as uninterested in reality as the current administration.
It's rich to declare "they're lying" while happily being disinterested in the truth or clear communication.
Iron Dome is a specific interceptor system, and you can trivially look up what it is on Wikipedia.
Iron Dome is still not a catch-all term for the entire Israeli defense system, and all the other claims the poster has made are not supported by their links or evidence.
As noted: Iron Dome intercepting ballistic missiles is an apparent new capability which it was not expected to be capable of: so it's kind of weird to turn up and say "Iron Dome can't intercept ballistic missiles anymore!" when no one except whoever developed the upgrades would've expected it to do that, and Israel has a number of other still unrelated to THAAD ballistic missile interceptor systems.
that after 4 years of Ukraine war where those tactics have been widely used, in some cases by both sides, and where Russia has even been using the same Iranian drones
I've read that NATO radars in Turkey were equally important to provide early warning to Israel. It's not far-fetched to assume that US radars in the middle-east did too. US THAAD in Israel would definitely be networked into those.
I think that there is a problem here - you're talking about the firing of the defense system at targets, whereas knowing that that radar needs to be readied because missiles have been detected is what the other radar system provided.
> Government obviously pretty silent on all these failures and media doesn't want to dig and ask hard questions
Some analysts are sure drumming up the severity [0]. In the fog of war, it is hard to tell what's exaggerated and what's not. The proposal by the current US Admin to increase defence spending by 40% to $1.5t is not a welcome sign for those opposed to heavy spending, for any number of reasons.
> In the fog of war, it is hard to tell what's exaggerated and what's not.
Honestly it's more than that. Propaganda and lies put out by ALL actors in this conflict. If you want to understand what's going on I think you have the expose yourself to as many competing sources as you can find. And still you're going to end up with a very shoddy picture. The term for this is epistemic collapse.
One of the things I have disliked about the Iranian conflict is that their propaganda/messaging has been, by quite a margin, more reliable than what the US/Israel have been putting out.
I like to think that I live in a free/liberal democratic portion of the world, but seeing the "other side" being more honest really puts a dent in things.
> One of the things I have disliked about the Iranian conflict is that their propaganda/messaging has been, by quite a margin, more reliable than what the US/Israel have been putting out.
The most recent example - I have been seeing reels/tik toks fronted by young women, that push Iranian talking points, they were saying that Trump's announcements on the conflict were timed to manipulate markets, and to "watch tomorrow"
They were referring to a Sunday before the Markets opened, and right on cue President Trump started making announcements that had a massive effect on market movements
Previously the USA government were downplaying (then retaliatory) Iranian drone attacks on bases in the middle east, claiming zero damage, and laughing at the attackers, the Iranians provided footage that showed real damage, and the US military released statement(s) that agreed with the Iranian claims.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that the Iranian regime is anything but a steaming pile of ew, but the lesson we were supposed to learn from the Vietnam war, and the Iraq war (II), was that hearts and minds are the key to "winning", and that's built on trust, which is built on transparency and honesty.
not only that, one big fact is that the Trump administration attacked twice Iran during negotiations. That sort of backstabbing gives you a sense of what their word is worth.
The easy example is that meta was full of influencers confirming the war was over, with the us having won, at a time Iran's own statements declared otherwise. That was a while back.
>One of the things I have disliked about the Iranian conflict is that their propaganda/messaging has been, by quite a margin, more reliable than what the US/Israel have been putting out.
Kek. Tell me you live in a bubble without telling me you live in a bubble.
"Both are doing propaganda, but one side's propaganda is totally less propaganda" gave me a good laugh today, thank you
The multiple sources don't know either, the reason the picture is shoddy is it is necessarily composed of the primary information that is coming from ... people with the strongest incentive to lie. There aren't a lot of independent ways to assess the situation. And of course that is part of the fog of war - even the militairy struggles to put together a picture of what is going on. I'd imagine that defining where the front-line is presents a complex and uncertain exercise for the commanders involved.
The only thing I think can be said reliably is that this has been going on for weeks, the Strait seems to be more closed than open, Trump is clearly out of his depth and the US is sending more units to the area. All of those point to a serious problem for the US military.
> it's baffling the US wasn't more prepared in its gulf bases.
Probably want to drop the assumptions about it having anything much to do with US interests. Better to start looking at who has had the alliance that contained them damaged and their oil sanctions lifted.
Problem is that there was too much propaganda in that war, that parsing propaganda is too difficult even for military watchers, let alone general public. Only when american weapons are being destroyed that, US MIC is willing to acknowledge that may be million+ usd missiles are not solution to cheap drones.
...and how decisively Trump was prosecuted for the 6/1/21 attempted ~coup~ tourism, and for how thoroughly the Epstein child abuse ring was dismantled, and...
Yes, the only chance the US has going forward is to primary all current incumbents and hold both party leadership accountable for complicity in treason.
Haha, by whom? There are zero higher-ups who are actually getting institutional backing and are in favor of this.
Look at how Mamdani didn't even get any backing. Quite the opposite, he was obstructed. And he's 100x more palatable to them than the idea of prosecuting the traitors.
The US and Ukraine have a direct relationship. They don't need to parse anything. Have people on the ground to watch how they conduct war. And bring people to the US to teach their learnings.
It's not that hard, the US just didn't want to do it for whatever dumb reason.
This is the second time in 2 weeks I’ve seen a comment like this on HN. 37 years old. Been on here 16 years. Incredibly odd to me. Just announce “can someone else tell me if this is true?”
I watched an interview with a retired British military guy who said that the radar destruction does complicate things, but the US still has the other AWACs, so there is still early warning and visibility, just complicates things and reduced range/more risk.
The E3 fleet is aging and difficult to keep airworthy. Of the 32 or so planes the US has, it sounds as though they struggle to keep the operational number above 16, and moving more to the gulf means they have to pull them from other theaters. In short, they simply don't have enough to provide coverage of all the areas they want them.
This was completely foreseeable and is a situation that appears to have arisen entirely due to vest interests stifling procurement of a suitable replacement in order to spruik up business for their own competing, but unfinished offering. Prior to the war in Iran, total cancellation of the procurement of E7's had been announced.
that's true about assertions, but blindly saying "Fact check!" is still an attempt to offload a wished-for effort onto other people while simultaneously sowing seeds of discernment and distrust into the topic.
What happens when someone yells "Fact check!" at absolutely true things constantly? It erodes confidence. That's why "Person yelling fact check" isn't a typical or generalized role in normal discourse.
Yes, it's good to correct the incorrect. How does one do that typically? A rebuttal.
A supposed 'deferment to experts' on the internet is worth next to nothing, just a way to paint yourself a bit more altruistically while producing FUD.
I asked if anyone could rebut it. Normally I'd do the work myself, but I'm not very up to speed on this stuff and I wasn't in a good place to do a bunch of research, and someone who's been following it more closely could probably do a better job pretty quickly. The comment smelled like a possible propaganda account to me, making what I thought were some pretty wild claims, and the commenters that were there were piling on because tribalism, so I was trying to act like an antibody in HN's immune system against nonsense, and flag it. Sorry if it sounded like a demand, it was probably too terse.
And it's worse than spam when someone is posting incorrect things and people are downvoting people questioning it. As another user has already posted, the Iron Dome does not use the same radar they are talking about and is not "blind"
IMHO, people making claims should provide the evidence for them. One link is behind a paywall and the other clearly states that it is making informed speculations.
I could make all sorts of claims on the spot here. It doesn't create a duty for people reading this thread to go investigate them.
You're so close, just one more step, and it's easy, just have to step away from keeping it hypothetical.
<SPOILER>
Then it certainly does not create a duty for people to go investigate, when the only difference is "someone replied telling someone to fact check"
</SPOILER>
You're the one in this thread claiming people are responsible for "going and finding the evidence" of other people's unsourced claims. You could have just not replied since you didn't have something to contribute.
I apologize for not quoting you directly “Then go get some!”. That’s what you said in response to there being no evidence. Would you like a link to your comment?
"People are responsible for going and finding the evidence" and "Then go get some!" are not paraphrases of each other. They don't share a single word, or advance a similar idea. I am uncertain linking comments can change that.
I'm not sure what's going on: "People are responsible for going and finding the evidence" and "Then go get some!" are not paraphrases.
Best steelman I can come up with is you're seeing deep red, so it's hard to see "Then go get some!" is suggesting he could fact-check his own question instead of asking the room to do it for him.
Which is the opposite of your characterization that I think people are responsible for investigating strangers' unsourced claims. We violently agree, not disagree.
Making this exchange all the curiouser.
Are you inebriated? I only ask because it's unusual to see someone on HN choosing to say obviously incorrect things, aggressively, on purpose, just to talk down to someone. Much less making bullying attempts based on comment history.
Did a quick search, didn’t see confirmation that they’re blind/that all radars had been knocked out. Was asking whether others who know more about this topic than me would confirm.
Traveling with kids on spring break, I don’t have time to read all war related news, and it tends to set off my propaganda account alarm when someone registers a new account to drop a bunch of assertions on such a politically divisive topic. So I was asking whether someone could confirm things like “The whole CENTCOM is blind basically, as well as Iron Dome which relied on these radars - all blind now, in addition to long-range early nuke detection to protect CONUS is also blind.”
There’s a good reason new accounts are colored green.
No problem - Trump is asking for an FY 2027 1.5 TRILLION dollar military budget, and just said that Medicare and Medicare may need to be cut to afford it.
In a "rational" world the quagmire of Iran would make such a move unlikely, but with this administration the prospect of an "easy win" could have them just go for it.
After all, nobody's stopping them. The Constitution only remains so that the 2A fanatics can LARP at being patriots.
> Rare Earth Minerals... ...unable to repair the damage any time soon (probably for decades)
Look bro, if we can make SR-71s out of pizza ovens, I'm pretty sure somewhere in the CIA can scrounge up a few ounces of gadoluminium. Tankie dreams are placation for those who wait for somebody else to make the birdseed fall from the sky.
Absolutely. A big part of the western Ukrainian defense was solely to drain the Russian military apparatus and drain they have. It will take Russia decades to rebuild their fighting force. Now Russia and China are doing it right back to us and the intelligence gained from this conflict is extremely valuable. Come to find out the US has been sitting on ego in its military more than actual might. The previously untouchable machines of war in the sky are now very much touchable. All that's left is for them to sink a battle ship. If Iran can shoot them down, you can bet China can inflict exponentially more harm. Drain our intercept missiles, destroy radars, corrode relationships, etc. At this point, China has the world on a silver platter if they want it.
Russia has rebuilt their military, which was neglected at the beginning of the war. The Russian and Ukrainian armies have adopted to drone warfare, which the rest of the world lags behind.
They haven't rebuilt the manpower. They've lost no less than a few hundred thousand fighting age men over the course of the war. It will take them 20-30 years minimum just for those births to occur and those newborns to make it to military age.
In case you haven't been following Ukraine, that's what it's doing. It has multiple cheap long range drones (FP-1, FP-2, etc) plus more expensive ones (FP-5), and it's making them in the millions a year, I think.
They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.
no, the million or two is small battlefield drones, mostly quadcopters carrying an RPG warhead or similarly sized payload. The long range drones - and they carry only relatively small, like 20-50kg payloads - are well under 100 thousands. FP-5 was declared 1 per day half a year ago. By now i think we've seen may be 10-20 such missiles used - they use real turbo jet engine, there isn't much of them available, and they are expensive.
>They just took out 40% of Russian oil export capacity.
Yes, Ust-Luga and Primorsk. Very successful hits. Painful for Putin. Yet it isn't a knock-down. Russia is like a big drunk guy in a street fight - just delivering painful blows to him doesn't help, you have to deliver a knock-out blow, and unfortunately Ukraine still seems far from it.
That works for Iran because US air-defense is still comprised mainly of advanced and expensive systems (like the Patriot). It doesn't work as well in Ukraine or Russia because both have figured out drone interceptors quite well. Both countries do the type of attack drone clustering you suggest. I read somewhere that a strike like from Russia that might include 60-70 drones + ballistic missiles in the hopes that one or 2 get through.
you miss that i was talking about 650km/h "drones" (because, yes, it was already 3rd year of war, and 200km/h drone like Shahed became much easier target - this is why Russia has started to also use the 600km/h modification of Shahed with RC jet engine). There is related discussion under that comment addressing your point about interception.
>Both countries do the type of attack drone clustering you suggest
Ukraine still isn't completely there. They do attack Russia with up to 200 drones/day. They seem to never cluster more than a few, and the drones they are using are comparably small - 50kg warhead - and slow, 100+ km/h, almost always less than 200km/h. So they are easy to intercept/shoot down, almost never penetrate Moscow air defense, and do noticeable damage only when hitting flammable targets like oil/gas industry related.
For the United States, the government doesn't have the capability to extricate Israel from its political system, but the feds can create blowback for Israel which makes them less capable to influence the US in the future while achieving other strategic aims in the region. US war planners know plenty about blow back and I think this is being done on purpose. I am terrified for innocent Israelis, Iranians and Gulf state residents that have been led into this. Most of the states and peoples in the Middle East who have been destroyed used to be allies with the US. That isn't on accident.
Nope, that would take congressional approval and congressional leaders are all bought by the people that paid for the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996. At this point only DoD and CIA can make it happen, thus why I mention any of this.
Moved on how? Satellites are useful for launch detection and cueing but as far as we know there isn't a satellite constellation capable of tracking airborne targets with enough precision for targeting. And the military couldn't really keep such satellites secret: the emissions would be impossible to hide.
The problem is that the losses indicate something worse. A breakdown of doctrinal disciplin- mostly created by chronic underestimation of advesaries in the region. If Israel can pulp the proxxies that easy, iran would be easy. Thus it was not necessary to do what ukraine does- mostly keeping planes in the air so they are not bombed on the runway, rotating them among bases - etc.
Which is specified as a strategy in the doctrine of the airforce.
This is exactly the situation I think of when I hear news of rescue missions. Running a rescue in a place with functional air defense is a recursive rescue problem that could quickly get out of control.
The first time I ever attempted a rescue mission in KSP, I ended up stranding 5 different kerbals in various orbita nearby trying to get the first one, and of course every one was a bigger and more complicated craft trying to save as many kerbals as possible. Eventually I just gave up and put a giant cross memorial in orbit, part as a reference to Neon Genesis Evangelion, and part as a memorial to the like 6 kerbals I left stranded in space.
Kerbals don't need food or water and can live forever on a limited air supply. I once rescued a kerbal who got stuck around their equivalent of Venus for multiple years. So it's all fine, they'll patiently wait...
My neighbor was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, the one mentioned in this article who came back with over 100 bullet holes in his helicopter after the rescue operation: https://historynet.com/rescue-in-death-valley-with-hhm-163-t... That rescue wasn't to retrieve a pilot, but nearly 200 surviving soldiers being overrun.
It's difficult to squeeze stories out of him, mostly because it was so long ago and ancient history to him. Just to put his timeline in perspective, after the war he befriended a captain of the White Russian Navy who had to flee after losing the Russian Revolution. Alot of White Russians ended up in San Francisco, which is where my neighbor settled down in the '60s. He was also a military escort for Nelson Rockefeller, I think during one Rockefeller's campaigns. Once a staunch Republican, needless to say he's not a fan of where the Republican Party has ended up since then. Still a gung-ho Marine, though, who keeps insisting on climbing over our 10-foot fence whenever he locks himself out of his house, which means I have to jump the fence. Were it anyone else I'd just call and pay for a locksmith myself, or badger him to finally give me copies of his keys.
>Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 miles per hour (200 km/h). It arrived on board uninjured, but in a disoriented state. When it recovered, it attacked the crew.
Iranian Air defense getting lucky is different to it being impenetrable.
This is not a binary situation, and a lucky F-15 kill would not make it a good idea to concentrate more assets in an area where the US will now focus more resources.
…against the viet cong, where the biggest risk was the pilot getting pierced from small arms fire (in addition to the helo going down from pilot error). Quite different from the anti-air weapons modern day Iran possesses.
But I’m responding to the rescue mission comment, which, since Vietnam, have overwhelmingly employed helicopters (Huey’s then, Black Hawks today). But machinery aside, the larger point is that air operations will likely go worse here than they did in Vietnam, unfortunately for both sides.
I imagine Trump would threaten to nuke a major city if it didnt stop and pilots werent returned safe. Not that I agree, but I think that's what he would emotionally do.
Cheaper to operate than any fighter, longer endurance, good for patrolling over the Strait. Filling the gap between helicopters and fighters with a big, but cheap cannon.
Geran-2 (which is Russian licenced Shahed drone) also carries air-to-air missile, so sending slow archaic manned airframe is just suicide mission (aka shaheed)
That is not a Shahed drone, that is a Geran-2 drone. Which is similar from the outside but not the same. Also Iran doesn't have stock of R-60s I think.
Well, bijowo1676, you need a RADAR to find the target before you shoot at it. An IRST can be used, or an off board track, but that is a an expensive and limited capability technique, and usually used to augment a RADAR, not replace it. The missile IR seeker has a narrow FOV.
"Just fine" for what? AGM88 is air-to-ground and manpads are surface-to-air. If you're implying that manpads work just fine instead of A-10s, you're wrong.
Well, they absolutely can with a BRRRRT, but if you mean "AGM 88 HARMs are a poor weaponeering choice against a Misagh-3", then sure, no argument here. But a dude on a hilltop with a shoulder tube is not the only type of air defense.
I'm not sure why any of this is relevant. The question I was responding to was about why A-10s are even in-theatre, given there's no boots on the ground yet.
The answer to that question is "they're probably doing SEAD". They might also be there to hit Iranian naval drones, though I doubt it'd be effective in that role.
Well, A-10s are well suited for strafing runs, etc. Presumably they'd be sent in if the area they're entering is presumed safe. That clearly didn't pan out.
The reality is avoiding a ground operation was probably the wrong move at this point (ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not)
It's really hard to truly guarantee surface to air capabilities are gone when you're relying purely on sat images + aerial surveillance (and obviously this carries risk). Iran has fairly portable SAM systems that are public knowledge.
> ignoring the spicier broader debate of if the whole Iran campaign was the right call or not
How spicy of a debate is that really? How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
Clearly this war isn't popular but that's a far cry from saying there's no debate. Like many other topics/questions we're seeing people following their tribe and bubbles rather than actual debating.
I would question to what extent repeating propaganda, qualifies as debate.
Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate.
There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Iran needed to be bombed, it took absurd incompetence to start doing so before planning how to handle asymmetric warfare against drones in an affordable way.
Repeating propaganda does not generally qualify as debate.
Why isn't there a productive debate to be had here?
Your arguing that the incompetence has to do with handling drones. To me that statement feels close to "repeating propaganda" because the Shaed drones are generally handled in an affordable way which is by shooting them with bullets from helicopters: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uZ07pcDGE70
There are endless videos and news stories about how drones are shot down effectively by the UAE (with AH-64 cannons), by Israel (where Iran doesn't even bother sending drones over because none of them make it), and by Ukraine (including with newer counter-drone tech they have).
The propaganda says "we fire a 2 million dollar THAAD missile on a 50k dollar drone". Many can be shot down cheaply. Some are shot down with $500k AA missiles. We also need to account for anything destroyed on the ground and not launched. So it seems like your opening argument can certainly at the very least be debated.
OTOH it is true that some drones got through and inflicted significant damage. But maybe that's unavoidable to some degree.
Even beyond the base statement. If you think Iran needed to be bombed, e.g. because they were manufacturing 100 long range ballistic missiles per month and because they had enough nuclear material to make 12 bombs and were working on all the technology pieces to be able to put them on ballistic missiles and launch them, then what would be the alternative universe where we somehow magically came up with solutions to the asymmetric nature of this war? Would waiting for them to have a lot more missiles and drones and bury them deeper be a good thing or a bad thing. What would be the odds of the regime either compromising and giving up their abilities or collapsing without external intervention.
I also think there was an initial “euphoria” (I guess) during the initial days of the campaign.
People I know (even Iranian expats) were excited to see the regime get hammered and there was hope for possibility of change (and also a little bloodlust)… but I think as the war drags on and the US is exposed to be in an un-winnable mess, sentiment will continue to sour.
This has already started to happen in Nate Silver’s post you linked.
Trump has been talking about destroying Iranian desalination plants, and "bombing the country back to the stone age". This is no surgical decapitation strike, nor one just targetting Iran's military capabilities. This is a vicious senile old man living out his dictator "I can do anything I like" fantasies, who could care less about helping the Iranian people, or those in America for that matter.
I am shocked that the Democrats are not making clear to the military that engaging in crimes against humanity may have consequences for them -- not to speak, of course, of politicians higher up in the chain of command.
75 million using the YouGov number and just under 100 million using the Nate Silver average. (I think you must have used the more Trump-favorable number AND included children in your computation, which is not reasonable.)
Also worth noting that Nate Silver's measure has been declining for almost 3 weeks, the majority of the duration of the invasion.
Before the invasion, a University of Mariland poll says 55 million and a YouTov poll says 71 million support. These are useful numbers because we know there's a rally around the flag effect that distorts thinking during a conflict.
20-25% of Americans would support Trump pulling his pants down and taking a shit on the floor in the oval office on live TV. These people's opinions shouldn't be taken into account or respected in these discussions.
That is an interesting take. Seen from elsewhere in the world, we cannot afford not taking into account a big chunk of the American electoral body, which is effectively at war with us (by various means).
Essentially, a MESA movement, “Make the Earth Shit Again”.
The obvious implication is that the rest of the world is at war with the US (by various means), and should act accordingly, starting with a wide-ranging consumer boycott of all US products.
> Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
Herschel Walker got 48.6% of the Georgia vote against Warnock. Slightly different in that Walker was a popular football hero in Georgia but he was also clearly mentally incompetent.
You can see that factor in a large number of polls on all kinds of subjects. It doesn't matter what the question is, a fifth to a quarter of the population will make the dumbest, least consistent, most self defeating choice every time. I think if you can get ~70% of the population on board with something that's all that should matter because the bottom 25% of the intelligence curve are literally incapable of making good decisions and worrying about them or their opinions will only lead to disaster. I also think that this is a major flaw of a lot of democratic systems because if a movement can effectively mobilize that group to vote as a bloc then it can easily sway policy. Add in messed up systems like in the US where you can amplify the power of that bloc beyond their population and it easily explains how we got here
The problem with this line of argument is that people will put you in that camp as well and paint you as the "dumbest". Let's take it as truth that 25% of a population are morons. You say those morons are all in the camp that opposes your policy/opinions. The other side says those morons are all in your camp (including you). And that's how we shut discussion down and get more polarization.
I think the reality is a lot of people aren't that smart. And sometimes even smart people can make bad choices. The average IQ is 100.
"• Individuals who identify as Republican have greater probability knowledge
• Individuals who identify as Republican have higher verbal reasoning ability
• Individuals who identify as Republican have better question comprehension
• Cognitive ability’s effect on party identity works through socio-economic position"
At least this does not seem to support the common opinion here of presumably a democrat leaning crowd (based on the comments) who seem to think that their opponents are all morons.
Bottom line of sorts for me is that we need to be able to debate issues from first principles and based on facts. We often go to appeal to emotion and herd mentality instead. Very much so on these sorts of partisan button pushing threads.
Your first link says 28% support it, so somewhere between 28 and 37%. I do wonder how many of those people could find Iran on a map, though I suppose you could ask the same about the people who are against it.
The number for boots on the ground is more like 12% though. And the people opposed to the war span various bubbles or tribes, including some right-wing influencers. You can easily find critiques of the conflict from various former military and intelligence officials across many podcasts, news media and Youtube channels.
Surprisingly so, I would say. Without going into any identifying details, my buddy, who is otherwise fairly reasonable, thinks it was. I disagree. Reported country split ( US ) seems to fall some along common political lines though, so maybe we shouldn't be so surprised.
Then again.. I can no longer can rely on those surveys in any meaningful way.
> How many people outside of the admin and the dwindling hardcore trump base actually thought this was a good idea?
Almost every single Iranian in the diaspora. And every person who heard Iran chant Death To America while building a nuclear program and a ballistic missile program.
This is what bringing democracy looks like?! The regime is more entrenched than ever and our commander in chief keeps threatening to commit war crimes on a massive scale. If he follows through on what he says he will do and obliterates all the civilian infrastructure in the country it will kill mass numbers of innocent people and turn millions of survivors into impoverished refugees.
As bad as the regime is, and it's very bad, what we're doing is even worse for most Iranians and the odds a democratic government arises from the ashes of our bombing campaign is incredibly unlikely.
Yes, bombing schools, universities and dessalination plants is a sure way to have more democracy in a country. Especially double taps where you kill the rescuers.
The US have so many examples where they did so and worked!
Oh, didn't you hear, we actually _triple tapped_ the school, so after the first wave of rescuers was also hit, anyone who came to help was also attacked.
Even if true, it's legally incorrect, btw. There are 2 kinds of warcrimes: Rome treaty (the only legal definition) and Geneva convention. The Rome treaty allows countries to opt-out of the treaty, and then nothing on their territory qualifies as a war crime. Iran has opted out of the Rome treaty, and so when it comes to international law, nothing that happens on Iranian soil is a war crime.
And we all know WHY islamists want it that way. But of course they will confuse matters as propaganda ...
Second, "colloquial" definition of a war crime are Geneva convention violations. And ignoring that EVERY attack Iran executed in the 2 days was a warcrime in that definition. Every last one. They didn't even try to go after military targets for days. But ignoring that.
What warcrimes do, in the sense of the Geneva convention, is that they are justifications for the UNSC to intervene, should it want to. Well, Russia, China and France have just declared that the UNSC does not follow the reasoning that these are warcrimes. Not because they don't believe Geneva convention violations aren't heinous crimes (of course Iran has violated it constantly for 50+ years with constant heinous crimes), but that these states don't see any reason to act.
> Second, "colloquial" definition of a war crime are Geneva convention violations.
The other "colloquial" definition of a war crime is "things we prosecuted the Nazis for at Nuremberg".
One side here is playing "world's police", so this "but those people (that we've painted as fundamentalist extremist terrorists) are committing war crimes so why shouldn't we get to, too?" isn't exactly the fine upstanding argument that you seem to think it is, just as it's not when the IDF responds to children throwing rocks at main battle tanks with live ammunition and turning off the power to a country for three days.
I find it absolutely incredible anyone would choose to use such arguments to defend Iran's islamist regime. Why?Unfortunately every conflict has 2 sides. This is what the side you're defending does:
(man it's difficult to get a list of links into hacker news) (also: stolen from a reddit summary)
Recently, Iran has lowered the entry age into the Iranian military to 12, and they have a long and storied history of using child soldiers in the Iran/Iraq war as suicide bombers - and sending them into minefields tied together with rope to prevent escape, so they could be human minesweepers for tanks and adult soldiers [1].
550,000+ child soldiers were used in the Iran/Iraq war, with over 36,000 as young as NINE years old being killed. Martyrdom is taught in Iranian schools to this day [2].
UNICEF reports 1/5 of ALL marriages in Iran are child marriages. They can legally marry 13 year old girls, and can marry any age with the father’s permission; it’s likely higher than 1/5 as in rural regions it’s common for marriages to not be reported [3].
They just slaughtered 30,000+ civilian protestors in January who were demonstrating against a literal terrorist puppet state who has committed some of the worst human rights atrocities in the world in the span of their 50 year history [4].
Ayatollah Khomeini (Iran’s Supreme Leader) stated virgin women are to be raped prior to their executions (largely for minor acts) so they don’t die a virgin, and justified it through his interpretation of his religion [5].
Here’s Iranian Parliament chanting “Death to America”, which they do constantly [6].
They are directly funding and arming internationally recognized terror groups [7]. Based on Intelligence estimates, Iran-funded terrorist groups have been responsible for thousands of deaths, including hundreds of American personnel, since the 1979 revolution. Major casualties are attributed to Iran-backed proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, and various Shiite militias in Iraq [8].
And are visibly, via satellite, enriching uranium past 60% which is only used for acquiring nuclear weapons [9].
This is far from a complete list. We're not even discussing that iranian clergy are literally pimping underage girls for sex, which sharia is perfectly fine with (and also happens in other muslim states, including sunni ones) as long as what we'd call the pimp is an imam.
> I find it absolutely incredible anyone would choose to use such arguments to defend Iran's islamist regime. Why?Unfortunately every conflict has 2 sides. This is what the side you're defending
Pump the brakes and do not put words into my mouth.
There is not one statement in anything I've said here that defends Iran's islamist regime.
Because I don't.
Stop getting yourself all bent out of shape that side professing a moral/ethical superiority might be held to standards that befit that supposed superiority.
"According to witness accounts verified by satellite-based analyses, the school was triple tapped by three distinct strikes."
War crime isn't just a legal definition, just like the world was genocide-free before WW2. And by your reasoning it's totally fine to genocide people as long as no treaty/law prevents it. Of course it isn't.
Most people would agree to say that bombing a school or a dessalination plant is a war crime, whatever the convention was signed before. Schoolchildren are not responsible for the IRGC's actions.
If you trust wikipedia without checking the talk page, and frankly in anything remotely involving Israel, you've lost the plot. Sorry but it just isn't remotely neutral on more and more subjects.
And this is the old trick: judging one side by absolutist morals, and then claiming SOME portion of the other side was innocent. Obviously, this is a fallacy and not a reasonable way to judge the morals of an action.
In reality, of course, nearly everyone the Iranian government attacks is totally innocent, and that's 100% intentional on their part. From toddlers in Argentina to Metro goers in Brussels. In Brussels, in an Iranian organized terror attack the guy put 5 bullets in a baby in a child carriage, waiting to shoot the mother (she survived, by the way) until she collapsed to the ground. THAT is who is being targeted here. That was not an accident.
That's one side, and the other side ... makes mistakes.
Clearly, the moral problem here is a mistake by the other side. Clearly THAT's the problem that needs to be solved.
Removing an evil actor requires, frankly, evil actions. Any real moral system will allow for that. Have you ever been to Dresden? What happened there is far worse than even Hiroshima. There's a shelter you can visit there, with a book like in Lord of the rings. It is open to a partially burnt page with the text that people were panicking when the wind drew fire into the shelter during the bombing. People caught on fire, put it out in panic, and it would immediately catch on fire again. Then those people collapsed. The text ... ends there, with spilled ink. There are 2 child carriages in that basement.
This action is considered morally justified, even by the survivors at the time, despite the fact that it didn't even achieve it's military objectives (the factories it targeted weren't destroyed, the city center was, and the aircraft factories, the main target, had stopped producing for lack of inputs months before the attack started)
Both historically and in moral source texts you will find people give enormous moral leeway to actions meant to save others. To remove an evil actor. That is even the case when they cause incredible damage.
And you whataboutism is childish, on top of the basic fact that the school bombing happened in the first days of the war, after a stupid and sadistic decapitation strike that destroyed any chance of negotiated settlement.
It's not the US' job to punish the IRGC for their crimes, and now that they started this idiotic war, the situation in Iran is even worse than when it started, including for the population. Which is yet another complete, objective failure and a proof that bombing populations don't lead to regime change.
> That's one side, and the other side ... makes mistakes.
This is a widely biased interpretation absolving an army whose chief has declared "no quarters" (=war crime) and conducts double-tap strikes on civilian infrastructure. And who bombed Dresden, Gaza, Vietnam or Cambodia? Why was it wrong then, but now it's cool?
The BBC article in no shape, way, or form supports your statement that the school was "triple tapped".
The article was written by an Iranian, but let's just for a moment assume that they're not monumentally biased and instead let's look at the pictures and the text.
The picture in the BBC article clearly shows one impact point in the middle of the school building, and also one each in the surrounding IRGC buildings.
What "eyewitnesses" would have observed from some distance away would have been a series of explosions. Six to eight bombs, all dropped in rapid succession, likely from two to four planes.
Double-tapping (or triple tapping) involves a long delay between the initial hit and the follow-up hit. The idea being to also kill the emergency services personel that turn up... half an hour later.
The article carefully misquotes the locals who witnessed a series of explosions to suggest that this was a series of attacks on the school itself, but fails to scrape together the evidence to sell this narrative:
"suggesting it was hit more than once" -- but not proving. Actually, not showing that at all, since the picture clearly shows one hit on the building!
"around the Shajareh Tayebeh primary school" -- but not in the school.
"the area was "struck by multiple" -- the area around the school is an IRGC base, not "more school".
"Two damaged buildings" -- and then they admit one is the IRGC building leaving... one school building that was hit, once.
"difficult to independently verify" -- here the BBC admits to repeating IRGC propaganda without even bother to check the picture they put in their own article that obviously contradicts their biased narrative.
"speculation about what the intended target" -- what speculation? It was the IRGC base! It was a former IRGC building! Nobody in their right mind would "speculate" about this. This is a brazen lie.
"may have been used"
"who may have been operating"
etc...
I could keep on going, but why bother? This BBC article is total garbage, packed with deceptive language, weasel words, and "just asking questions".
The real, factually true heinous act here is the sloppiness of the US administration in keeping up with the changing status of IRGC targets. They got lazy, killed a 168 students and teachers, which is horrific.
We can blame them for their hubris. We can blame them for starting the war in the first place. We can lay the blame at their feet for any number of things.
But please don't repeat a made-up story of unbelievable, cartoonish evil. It's obvious that the US administration didn't set out to on-purpose kill school children! It's obvious that they didn't "double tap" the school building! It's obvious that they thought that they were hitting an IRGC building and it turned out not to be so. They made a mistake, but a mistake surrounded by deliberate war. Be angry at them starting this unnecessary war, which they did on purpose.
Why is it so hard to accept the basic fact that Iran - and Palestine (and China, and Russia, and Cuba, and ...) do not allow free press or free communication? That means with rare exceptions (unless someone is willing to risk their life for it) you ONLY have access to propaganda.
In any society that doesn't allow free press:
ANY television broadcast = government propaganda
Red Cross/Crescent = disguised government propaganda (Hamas/Iran's islamist regime)
ANY internet message = disguised government propaganda
ANY story published in the BBC with sources from that country = disguised government propaganda
ANY information delivered by anyone who wasn't risking their lives = disguised government propaganda
ANY information delivered by a foreign journalist "invited" into the country (ie. CNN in this conflict) = government propaganda (like "embedded journalists" in US army)
You do not have ANY information from within Iran except propaganda and very rare, very incomplete viewpoints (slowly) anonymously smuggled out. That's it. Yes, this means you generally just do not know. Not even if "the Red Cross/Crescent" says so, because they cannot risk saying anything but the government's viewpoint.
I get that this is very hard to understand for someone living in the US or Europe but that's how it is.
This was the case in the cold war with all the communist regimes. This is currently the case with Russia. With Cuba. With China. And, of course, with Iran. There is no information BUT propaganda from both sides. Nothing but that.
And sorry to point out the obvious, but given the choice between the US army and Iran's mullahs ... even Trump beats the islamist mullahs in reliability and credibility. Yes this is choosing the best option between Syfilis and Gonorrhea. But Trump wins that contest. Easily. Hands down.
Finding websites, or even 100-year old books that obviously lie about Israel is not exactly hard. Here's one you might not know about (look at the author, yes, it's really him): https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/48... (now this one is a rant, still far above average though)
And the BBC. Ahh the BBC. They used to actually have journalists, and ... well, clearly, they've decided that actually having journalists around the world is not that relevant to producing news anymore. The quality of their work is dropping like a stone year over year. Also, when it comes to reporting about the UK, they've obviously switched to just being a propaganda outlet. Even the historical articles about the poverty in Manchester, which is certainly not improving, can hardly be found on the BBC anymore. And there are no new articles made about it. And reporting on Scottish independence movements or Northern Ireland ... they've started just outright denying anything like that exists. BBC was great, up to about 20 years ago. Now it's barely more authoritative than any other news outlet. You know, the ones that almost exclusively just repeat press releases. You want to know what a government has to say about an event? BBC is your friend. You want to know the sentiment on the ground in an event? BBC doesn't even try to collect that anymore, and when it is presented to them, they refuse to report it. And they've "become political", on a great many different subjects.
There's other things on wikipedia where what we'd consider evil is winning more and more over time. The Armenian genocide, for example, where ever more attention is going to denying it ever happened. And the many genocides that happened at the end of the Ottoman empire at muslim hands, of which the Armenian genocide is merely the biggest example, have already lost the fight on wikipedia. Or the whitewashing of the extremely bloody and, frankly, disgusting early muslim history. Muslim slavery is getting erased, especially what young female slaves ... islam's involvement in the holocaust (ie. the involvement of muslim clergy in creating Nazi SS extermination squads in the balkan. It's still there ... you just won't find it linked anywhere). Or the downplaying of aspects of communism (such as the fact that socialist theory is rabidly, even violently, even murderously, anti-immigrant). Or ... every year the list extends further and further.
> This is a widely biased interpretation ...
What do you hope to achieve by doubling down on the totally one sided view of the situation? Iran's government is evil, massacres everyone it can, brutally tortures and executes children, sells underage girls for sex (perfectly legal in sharia as long as the pimp claims to be an imam) and deserves everything that's happening to it 100x over.
The link provided comes from the BBC. Wikipedia simply acts as an aggregator on certain topics, which is convenient to share in such debates.
Your ad hominem against the BBC is laughable, please provide a list of correct media sources then. And don't try to debate the content of course!
> Iran evil
The US and Israel have no goal to change that, so the population will in the end have a destroyed infrastructure, and a hardliner regime even more brutal than ever. Mission accomplished!
Even if you believe in the most absurd conspiracy theories you could still accurately classify US efforts as "trying to change Iran's behavior to the world for the better". So this is entirely, 100%, false.
And, yes, we all hope for more, which may or may not happen.
Ah yes, US efforts along with their actions against Venezuela, Lybia, Cambodia, Syria, Vietnam, Irak or North Korea. It totally worked, and those countries were much better than before the bombing!
When you think about it, every country between Pakistan and the mediterranean sea was bombed by the US in the last 30 years. How did it end up?
At some point the people in power very well know what's happening. Bombing schools, bridges, universities and hospitals don't create better regimes.
They just prove that hardliners of the IRGC were right from the start. Moderates have nothing to show, since the Trump admin never wanted to negociate. Yet another massive US self-own.
And I don't see why it is a conspiracy theory. Trump showed with Venezuela that he didn't care at all about democracy. And Israelis don't either. You are the one absorbing the blatant propaganda lies of the Trump administration.
... and then, of course, we switch moral fallacies. The supposed superiority of doing nothing. Hope you never need an ambulance, because of course, clearly, according to your reasoning the moral action would be to let you die.
And btw: your motivation, obviously that you want Iran hardliners to win inside Iran, is showing. Carefully placing the blame for the actions of the hardliners with the US. Needless to say, that is not a moral position at all.
There's many problems. First: every agent with agency is of course responsible for their own actions. Which means Iran's regime, islamists and islamic clergy are despicable monsters because of what they did.
That there is a reason they did what they did does not explain their actions in any moral sense. It makes it worse, of course. It means that they're indeed fully responsible for their actions, that they're not insane, made a choice, and their choice shows them to be truly despicable, immoral and disgusting human beings.
You are conflating "doing something" with "doing something useful".
The US could have chosen not to kill the supreme leader (who was the only one able to drive a change), a large part of the moderates in the government and negociators.
It could have chosen to send other people than crooked incompetent real estate managers to negotiate with Iranians about complex nuclear issues.
It could have chosen to propose an acceptable plan to Iranians that allowed room for negotiation, not just a blanket capitulation and surrender.
Your view of foreign policy is immature, similar to a child trying to wash the dishes and breaking them as he does. When the parents arrive, he cries and says "but I'm trying to help!".
And I don't like the IRGC but I also would prefer to avoid the humanitarian and refugee crisis and civil war in a 90M pop country. Which will happen after the US "liberates" them by bombing civilian infrastructure such as water treatment or electricity plants. Did they ever say "thank you"?
Because I know that others will pick up the pieces after the US and Israeli meatheads in power will come back home. Just like it happened in Irak, Syria, and Lybia.
All of those are choices the US government DID make, and Iran threw into their face before we switched to this. Which of course changes whose view of foreign policy is immature, but who cares? This is just a discussion forum.
Iran, the US and many other countries had a perfectly working deal under the JCPOA, until Trump, pressed by the Israelis, exited it. Which led to the current situations as Iranians weren't forced to limit their uranium enrichment.
Aren't those war crimes? Will anything be done about that I wonder. And if your goal is bringing democracy and liberating a people from a oppressive regime, then hurting the people by making their air unbreakable or bombing the water plants is NOT how you go about.
I understand that war is not pretty and regime change is brutal to all parties involved, but this is done in the worst way possible.
Most probably nothing. If things get really bad and there is a revolution or something of that magnitude in the US there may be a Nuremberg moment. Don’t count on it. Whatever government will come next will do everything they can to shield American generals and officials because otherwise they would be afraid the same thing would happen to them once they leave office. The only thing that could keep these people accountable is the American people through Congress. So yeah, probably nothing. Which is bad, because these war crimes are up there with what supposedly evil regimes did in the past.
> As a person who believes in democracy, I'm pretty on board with it.
As others have stated. This war will not bring democracy. Bombing Iranians have united them with the regime.
Also, US and Israel do not want a democracy in Iran. Israel would prefer a non-functioning place like Palestine or a mostly non-functional place like Lebanon that they can easily control.
Well, I have no idea. I'm just guessing it's not the reason I like the war.
I generally only attempt to scrutinize government action, and not government reason for action. Random citizens are at such an information disadvantage that I think it would be impossible to have an informed opinion as an outsider on the reasoning.
It could be as simple as "Iran kept trying to assassinate me so I'm going to assassinate them". Maybe he was pressured by Israel, I really have no idea.
> I generally only attempt to scrutinize government action, and not government reason for action
This might be the wildest opinion I've read.
You're onboard with the US bombing another country ("I like the war"), but you don't know, or care WHY. You just think it was a good idea.
"Random citizens are at such an information disadvantage that I think it would be impossible to have an informed opinion as an outsider on the reasoning."
I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but if you re-read your own words, you've just said a random citizen like yourself can't possibly know enough to have an informed opinion, yet you gave us your opinion, which is that you think they should have bombed Iran.
You need to reread my words. I never said I can't possibly know enough to have an informed opinion generally. Nor did I say it's impossible to have an informed opinion in what I gave my opinion on.
> Random citizens are at such an information disadvantage that I think it would be impossible to have an informed opinion as an outsider on the reasoning.
Denazify… oops, wrong country, sorry. "Changing the regime". But it cannot possibly be true because regime change, just like foreign wars are bad according to Trump. So, in reality, who knows?
My guess is that some nutcases at the pentagon got an adrenaline rush during the little adventure in Venezuela and looked for another country to mess with. It’s obvious that no real thought was put into what exactly is the point of all of this or how to actually get to that point. I mean, they were surprised that Turkey was upset and that Iran closed the Gulf. Or that none of the allies Trump has been shitting on for decades showed up. This does not point to any serious thought process.
If this is a troll it is masterful. If it's an honest opinion I would invite you to check your skull for unexpected holes where your brain may have fallen out.
You say this like a system of international law has ever existed that effectively restrains the most powerful nations in the world, democracies or otherwise.
The math teacher was more along the lines of as x approaches zero or was it f(x). It was a really really long time ago since I've had a math teacher, but the approaches zero was something said frequently
An unfortunate and unintended consequence of counterattacking the invader. Very different from bombing a school due to bad intelligence in an unprovoked attack.
A more likely explanation is that butterfly mines were dropped by Russian armed forces; see Human Rights Watch:
Russian forces have used at least seven types of antipersonnel mines in at least four regions of Ukraine: Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Sumy.
There is no credible information that Ukrainian government forces have used antipersonnel mines in violation of the Mine Ban Treaty since 2014 and into 2022.
Of course this is all tradition to bring rebellious minorities back into Russkiy Mir, just look at how Grozny looked in 2000. That was Putin's first war, started when he was prime minister.
Literally none of the fighting countries want Iran to be democratic. Neither USA nor Israel nor Iran. Israel dont want the country functional and would prevent democracy. USA idea of regime change is to keep regime, change head for someone who pays extortion money. And if Iranian leadership wanted democracy they would have one. Not sure if you noticed, but American admin loves dictators and insults democracies
So ,WTF are you talking about here.
Also, bombing city with that double tap tactic during protests ensures you kill protesters.
Having Iran be "non functional" would just be asking for even more hardliners take over, like what happened in syria. I don't take this to be actually indicative of their viewpoints.
Or in Gaza, and it is not an accident. As far as they are concerned it’s working great. Israel is in a state of permanent warfare, which completely silences any kind of debate about what country it wants to be, enables racist nationalists who can freely go about burning villages, and it keeps Bibi out of prison. None of what has happened in the last 20 years or so in the region strikes me as particularly well thought out with a long term strategy besides keeping all their neighbours in the Middle Ages.
I think that you will find that many people think that we ought to solve the 50 year old problem in the Mideast once and for all. Now that the Russians are busy, that Venezuela is down, that Syria has fallen, and that the Chinese are minding their own business is a good time to decapitate Iran. Also Cuba is next.
Permanently disarming Iran, and creating conditions favorable to the fall of the Islamist terrorist regime that has been bullying the Mideast since 1979.
No idea, but it's safe to say that Iran has lost most of their navy and air force already. It's harder to tell how many launchers, missiles, and drones Iran has left however, as it is deliberately hiding and conserving munitions for what they expect will be a protracted conflict.
The other unknown is how far the U.S., Isreal, and potentially other countries are willing to go. Turning the lights off and literally sending Iran back to the stone age wouldn't be so difficult at this stage, but would probably rule out the possibility of a deal that sees Iran disarm and hand over the enriched uranium.
You're basically advocating for war crimes which the US has already started to do.
Iran had already offered to give up the enriched uranium bit that is off the table now. Iran should and will pursue a nuclear weapon in order to protect themselves from American and Israeli imperialism.
I don't see the difference between the US and Iran given what you are suggesting. How would you treat an Iranian attack on the Golden Gate Bridge? Would you call that a cowardly terror attack?
Yeah, does sending them back to the stone age buy us anything good? 90 million starving migrants with an understandable axe to grind with the US? Or are we just going to kill them all and become the monsters we claim to hate?
You realize that Iran will retaliate by attacking their neighbors' power and desalinization plants? Do you want most of the ME to go dark and lacking water?
Even Netenyahu has said you can't do regime change without some sort of boots on the ground. Iran is much bigger and more mountainous than Iraq. The IRGC has a couple hundred thousand active personell.
North Korea was able to get nuclear weapons because we didn't want the carnage of artillery bombardment to Seoul that would have been the retaliation, had we stopped them.
Iran was close to achieving that same thing with ballistic missile bombardment of Europe.
The problem is that Iran, unlike NK, is run by a fanatical death cult with stated goal of attacking United States and history of running proxy militias in every nearby failed state, in a neighborhood that has no shortage of failed states.
The US defense secretary (excuse me, War secretary) is almost covered with tattoos and mottoes celebrating the Crusades [1]. I wouldn't go around accusing other countries of being run by "death cults" if I were you. We have a nuclear-armed death cult called Christian Dominionism here at home.
What makes you think the Iranian regime wants a destroyed country as opposed to setting up strong opposition to the West in the region? "Fanatical Death Cult" just sounds like propaganda for justifying war with them as opposed to diplomatic solutions. North Korea and Russia saber-rattle plenty. It's a tactic.
Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them. Not, "it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war," but, "these people's forebears didn't listen to our god, so we must always hunt them, and also the jews."
IF(highest sacrifice in your cult is dying while trying to kill those who disagree with you because of same) THEN (you are in a death cult)
> it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war
How does this work out when we are the ones that decided to start the war? Does saying the word "war" suddenly absolve us of the crimes we commit in that war?
> Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them. Not, "it can be ok to kill people who disagree with you once it reaches the point of war," but, "these people's forebears didn't listen to our god, so we must always hunt them, and also the jews."
You know the one about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?
>You know the one about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence?
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on asking for these claims, but you should consider what burden of proof you are asking for: constant political slogans advocating attacks? Or do you need the leader to explicitly state that that's not just a slogan? Forthright statements in their religious texts advocating the same?
And would you expect that level of specificity and forthrightness of other comparable claims?
No need for any benefits of the doubt, let me make myself perfectly clear. I think that you're throwing wild claims, relying on the general ignorance and media conditioning of the average American (largely the audience on this forum) in order to provide "familiar vibes" as the foundations of your claims in the minds of that audience.
Now, specifically, you said that: "Their idea of "martyrdom" is killing people who disagree with them". Are "they" Iranians? Shia? Muslims in general? People of the middle east in general? After having settled the question of who "they" are, you are then claiming that if they kill those who merely disagree with them, they consider those doing the killing to be martyrs? That would disagree with the common understanding of what a martyr is worldwide, and hence my comment about your claim being quite extraordinary.
I challenge you to not try to steer the topic away from my questions, or make additional claims without being specific and providing evidence for those either. I am not interested in widening the scope of the conversation into endless arguing.
Ok, I'll be clear too. I think your questions are meant not to seek answers, but as aspersions, and I am skeptical that any evidence, overwhelming though it might be in other cases, would satisfy you in this instance. Iran is exceptional in providing so much evidence of the leadership's ill intentions, and by your generalizations I doubt you are aware of them.
More playing to vibes. For the passive reader, given that no evidence whatsoever was provided (let alone of the extraordinary kind) despite having been given ample opportunity to do so, please consider the extraordinary claims to be effectively retracted.
The military advantage of colonial powers, and the political weakness of the pawn countries is reduced making the great game harder. Venezuela and Syria fell because internally they were divided and the US could find traitors willing to sell out. That didn't happen in Iran, and Cuba will defend themselves if they are united.
The A-10 is a horrible friendly-fire as a service. Might as well use the thing as a bomb truck while you are still forced to keep it in service because certain brain cell lacking individuals think brr is good.
They do. India-Pakistan was basically a field trial of Chinese AD. It failed miserably but the Chinese blame operator error (which is still valuable info; there is no reason to assume a PLA ground operator would be more competent than a Pakistani one).
They sell them. Military gear (at least aircraft and missiles) aren't cheap like an AK47. They have enjoyed watching India and Pakistan in their latest air battles. Lots of operational intel gleaned from that.
It's an airplane. It is as susceptible to doors not being bolted on as much as a civilian flight. Maybe actually a higher chance of some benign mechanical issue as it is well known that air crews are often overworked with little to no sleep with the high tempo of sorties in these types of missions. Lots of historical examples of US military aircraft crashing from mechanical issues and not being shot down
At war there's a lot more pressure on ground and air crews that can lead to more mistakes. Also the mission would be flown closer to the limits vs. training.
So... We don't know? If your question is whether that's a good guess/greater than zero probability then sure. Is it a certainty? No. The Iranians will claim they shot it down. The Americans may or may not admit and if they deny then people will say they're lying.
In the first Iraq war, the KARI system in Iraq, which was built by Thompson-CSF, had its specifications leaked and the US obtained access to back doors and codes that allowed it to bypass and/or disable much of that system. You need to remember that the US and much of the West had friendly relations with Iraq and provided some infrastructure assistance and military support because Iraq invaded Iran.
No such analogous advantage exists in Iran, which is a much larger country, with better air defenses, and no western contractors ready to provide back doors into systems.
By that same logic that fact that we only lost 1 F-15 in, what, almost 3 weeks of bombing is actually a pretty good sign. Especially when you factor in that the Russians (proven) and Chinese (yet to be proven) are assisting Iran and Iran has been buying and building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people just for this very attack, only to have almost everything obliterated.
And 3 weeks in to the war and the US is flying refueling tankers to refuel Blackhawks in the very area the F-15 was shot down to recover the pilots (1 so far has been received) should be much more informative than it seems to be.
Is that reliable? The IRGC basically runs the economy and takes a significant cut. The IGRC is also separate from the military. The nuclear program, quite obviously for military use, may also not be included. What about support for proxy groups? Hezbollah alone gets support above $1B per year.
I tried to check the amounts normalized for % of GDP.
Conservative estimates put them at half of the 2% GDP military spend. However, the IRGC's tentacles are also estimated to siphon off something like +50% of the GDP.[0]
Not all of that money's going to military hardware, but they have a substantial slush fund and use the Iranian resource base as a military piggy bank.
Which is a logical result of decades of sanctions, allowing only the insiders to profit from the country's ressources while the common man is bared from providing an alternative. Sanctions do not work and only entrench regimes, as we see in Russia, Cuba, North Korea and now Iran.
I've just been at a conference where some high-up guy from germany was talking about the effect of sanctions... russia used to sell wood pulp to germany, german factories would produce paper products and then sell a lot of them back to russia.
Then sanctions came, no more very cheap wood pulp for the german industry, and after a year of sanctions, the russians built (i think) 4 large paper factories, so even after the sanctions end, that business is not coming back to germany.
Why? If the objective is to weaken a regime, and the sanctions strengthen it, why should you help your “enemy”?
The classic mistake here is to consider that dictatorships are like democracies—they aren't, and their power structure is different and more resilient to economic shocks. Even Bachar Al-Assad, who was much weaker, took 13 years to leave power.
At some point, one should question if wide sanctions targeted at increasing the suffering of the civilian population are really worth it.
Your assumption here is that, since sanctions strengthen the regime, not having sanctions weakens the regime, which is not logical.
Not having sanctions potentially strengthens a regime more than sanctions do, embeds them in the global geopolitical/cultural/economic stage, normalises their behaviour, and goes against a lot of people's deontology.
Look at Israel: no sanctions, strong Zio regime, majority of US/German pop supported the "self-defense" argument for decades, complete normalisation of Palestinian genocide until the horror reached an unbearable threshold. Etc., etc.
Yes, sanctions are far from perfect, but I strongly believe that a world with Israel santioned would have been a much better place for everyone, including the Israelis (from having to contend with their ideology).
Edit: I'm also aware that my argument is not perfect either. For example, I wouldn't qualify what Cuba has or what Iraq had as sanctions in the sense that I'm talking about: these are to my eyes an economic war of aggression by the US/West. What I'm defending is sanctions on fascist and ethonationalist global/regional superpowers that are engaging in large-scale horror. But I'm aware how leaky my definition is.
You can do sanctions on items that allow the regime wage wars (weapons and dual-use products), yes, that can work. Or wide sanctions on small countries such as Israel can be a credible deterrent, since it lacks economic depth to find substitutes.
However, wide sanctions on large countries such as Russia or Iran are now proven to be quite ineffective in the long run. Even worse, by preventing the creation of a middle-class, you won't have the conditions to start a democracy later, after a possible regime change.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it's what data shows.
And sanctions don't prevent countries from committing atrocities either. What about the deaths and suffering induced by sanctions? 500k Iraqi children were estimated to have died due to the US sanctions. The architect of the policy told that it was "worth it". Was it?
Sanctions also affect population and create indirect deaths and suffering in the civilian population.
I guess that, just like Madeleine Albright, you believe that 500k Iraqi children death caused by US sanctions were "worth it"? (US still wanted to invade after, proof that sanctions worked!)
Hypothetically, imagine that you become president of US today, inheriting current situation. What would you do regarding Iran situation?
What is the correct action now in current situation?
Spoiler: I think there is no “correct” solution, somebody will be hurt in the end despite best wishes.
Note: Lower supply of oil and fertiliser affects poorer countries more than the rich ones (possibility of famine in Africa).
Current Iran government just killed their own civilians a month ago in thousands to end protests; and repressions will likely repeat as protests are likely to repeat. (Irans populace seem to be quite educated and want some reforms)
Ground invasion of Iran would cost a lot of lives - civilian casualties always exist.
No it's a great question. As always when someone makes a point about something, one should ask "up to which point do you believe this to be true". It's the same in science.
The US president is not in charge of the application of human rights in Iran. It's amazing that Americans are so concerned about human rights in oil-rich countries, only. Right?
The US generally don't understand other countries' internal dynamics and only leave a mess after dropping bombs to "liberate" those ungrateful civilians.
Obama's JCPOA was a good framework, I'd work to reinstall it.
Paper is definitely not the only thing Russia was importing. Check statistics of Russian aviation accidents (not sure if Germany was in supply chain for aviation, but this is visible thing that clearly was affected by sanctions)
Is there evidence sanctions strengthen a regime? With Russia at war right now, sanctions do indeed seem to be helping Ukraine with Russia having a budget crisis.
Sanction strengthen the political grip of a regime on society, which can use them as a justification for its repression. They also hollow-out the middle class, which prevents a democratic societal change, which requires it.
In the case of a war, it is of course useful, but it won't solve the long-term issue of the nature of the Russian regime, which has gotten only more entrenched since 2014.
Extensive domestic economic control by security forces is also a feature of Egypt and Pakistan. America does not complain about those examples of course, because those countries bend the knee.
Half the world chants that. Currently, probably more. Americans have managed even to alienate the ass-kissing politicians from europe. Even in US, the people are protesting against the current president, and no wonder... trump wants 200 billion more while people can't afford healthcare and education and some cities look like cities from apocalypse movies, with homeless camps everywhere.
Currently lot if people dislike/distrust america. Which is understandable and rational thing to do. Chanting “deato xyz” is very irrational and unproductive and just bad.
if I was disliked and distrusted by a lot of people I’d think long and hard about why that is vs. complaining about how that dislike/distrust is communicated
They should probably be closer to 0 or more in line with European countries but these numbers aren’t accurate and don’t tell the full story. They don’t, for example, include money paid to and missiles transferred to Houthis to launch from Yemen. Nevermind Hamas and Hezbollah, rebels in Iraq and so forth.
> European countries are protected by NATO and a nuclear umbrella.
Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time, which is the ideal thing, but it seems like maybe we can't live in that ideal world, anyway...
I'm not suggesting that Iran shouldn't have a military, but instead questioning the purposes for which it would have one. Today its military is used for sending missiles at Gulf States, funding Hezbollah, and oppressing its people. So for it to have little to no military practically speaking would be a good thing.
Second at 2.5% GDP (again these figures are highly questionable) that's plenty to have defensive capabilities versus neighbors. There's nobody there to really worry about because who outside of the United States is going to invade Iran? And even then the US is only doing it because they won't stop doing crazy shit and launching missiles at everyone.
Yes, Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy who has, in violation of UN actions and against Lebanese government wishes seized and held territory in Lebanon from which to launch rockets into Israel lol.
If you're going to use that as such a loose category than the list of countries that have been attacked expands quite a bit. Israel has attacked Iran, while Iran has attacked Israel, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, USA, and maybe one or two others that I'm not thinking of.
Do we now start listing American proxies and their terrorism? CONTRA alone should make the USA deserving of several nukes dropped on its lands by that measure.
It’s been ones of months since USA attacked Venzuela. We are openly musing about invading Greenland. We are actively embargoing and threatening to invade Cuba. We are the unhinged aggressor in all of this.
There is no civilization on the planet that would accept full disarmament under the logic that they should just trust that you won’t attack them if they weren’t armed.
Let's be fair, if someone bombed trump right now, most of the world would be happy, including a lot of americans.
Does that mean that someone should bomb US because of your regime? I mean... you have more homeless people living in tents than most cities post some natural disaster, your people can't afford education, healthcare nor (as above) homes, and you guys are spending money to bomb a place half a planet away that is in no way endangering you... and that after you've bombed it once before and "completely destroyed the nuclear program"... and before that and before that.
I mean... i understand americans are well... americans, but you guys can't even imprison pedos running your country, why should you decide who to bomb?
I mean.. what's next? Iranian special forces will eventually start destroying stuff in US, and you guys will claim "terrorism" or something again... well, it's not terrorism if you're in a war.
> Well, protected by the United States primarily. They've mostly divested from military spending and capabilities over time,
UK and France have nukes, european nato part isn't going to be invaded without nuclear exchanges.
Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
> UK and France have nukes, european nato part isn't going to be invaded without nuclear exchanges.
I like to think this is true, but how many French soldiers coming home in body bags defending Lithuania will it take before they say enough? Are they going to just resort to nuclear weapons against Russia immediately? I don't think the nuclear umbrella is the trump card that it you might be portraying it to be. It's really difficult to say who would use those and when. There are some obvious cases, but there are also some not so obvious ones.
But nukes aren't enough. You're not winning the Ukraine war with your nuclear umbrella for example - that's being won on the ground with Ukrainian blood.
> Apart from that, each country is specialized on various things and combined military is quite capable.
Combined command of a military like this is incredibly difficult, and while I'd certainly agree that some specific militaries are quite capable of [1], I think the political and organizational system in Europe really poses a challenge. But even so those militaries lack power projection capabilities and lack in some other key areas.
[1] In order probably Ukraine -> UK -> France -> Poland and then nobody else registers. Ignoring Russia because they're not really European IMO.
> Sure, it's not US level of spending... which is probably a good thing given the US basically cut education and healthcare for a few generations for that.
Nah, we actually have money to easily afford both we just have a bunch of morons in charge (Democrats and Republicans) who, particular to healthcare, have gotten us the worst of both worlds. Education we're #1 there's no question about that.
France trained the most efficient recon crews, and the most efficient Ukrainian sniper units (some of them led by ex french soldiers. At least with a french passport, or on the verge of getting one). Caesar MK1 are the most efficient howitzer by a large margin in Ukrainian conflict, and Ukraine have half the French number, and first MK1 units, when France is starting to get Caesar MK2. Our MBTs is so much better than Ukrainian tanks it isn't a comparison, and French rafales are not a joke, unlike su57s. When it come to boots on the ground and artillery support, nobody can beat Italy in Europe, though Finland probably can give it a run, and both countries would have defended Russia aggression easily. Special units are not even a consideration tbh, both French and Italian winter units are incredibly better trained than Spetnaz it appears (and they have the advantage of like, not being dead), and even they are less well trained and equipped than those in Finland/Sweden/Norway/Denmark or UK.
If you're talking about global capabilities, including power projection, then the ranking have to start with France, and have Italy very, very close to the UK if not ahead (if we don't take into account nukes), and then Spain should be slightly above Poland and Ukraine, maybe with Finland and Sweden in the mix (gripe3 and CV90?). German have the Gepard which seems to be the best response to drones, but their army is too new. The only thing Europe truly lacks is a strong IFV with reactive armor like the Bradley, maybe the Lynx would qualify but the quantity is clearly not enough.
And here I didn't talk about military doctrine and how well both French, Italian and German equipment fit their own, which to me is a huge advantage right after the early days of a conflict, because even when no one really know what to do and improvise, at least the whole army group improvise in the same direction.
True, Turkey is a bit harder to rank. Or was hard to rank before February. They showed during NATO joint exercise projection capability i didn't know they were capable of, and imho they should be ranked around UK/Italy on projection capacity (though special forces seems to be a weak point, so probably below them tbh). If the fight is local though (in first sphere of influence), yeah, they probably are the first fighting force in europe (including Russia), with their army size, drone, artillery and AA capacity.
> Education we're #1 there's no question about that.
I am wondering what you mean. Top-tier universities full of foreign nationals doing excellent research and funded by exorbitant fees? Sure.
But what about pre-college education?
Reading this thread, with people variously claiming things about Israel as if the country had sprung up from nothing with divine rights on the 7th october, or about Iran, as if the regime had suddenly appeared in 1979, without any US involvement in its suffering before (1953) or after (1984), makes me willing to question that education in the US is promoting critical thinking. Maybe the time spent singing the anthem would be better used actually reading history?
> Education we're #1 there's no question about that.
Education is about social mobility, a chance for anyone to participate depending on their intelligence/grit/motivation.
You guys only have education for the rich/elite.
If you have to pay for it, or be lucky to have parents next to good schools then you've failed.
> But nukes aren't enough.
Lookup french nuclear doctrine to see discouragement effect.
Also, european NATO is capable of bombing conventionally moscow/other russian cities in case of war with some losses.
Eliminating Putin/Leadership would probably stop any war.
That would probably be the first counter to any invasion with threat of using nukes as a threat to keep russia from going for nukes. (losing moscow/sankt petersburg might be too much for russia same as paris/berlin would be for other countries)
The other counter is some rapid deployment of troops to hold off any russian troops and make it very deadly for them until leadership decides to retreat.
> By that same logic that fact that we only lost 1 F-15 in, what, almost 3 weeks of bombing is actually a pretty good sign.
"Good sign" of what, though? Air superiority? I guess, sure. But we've constructed a strategic situation for ourselves where mere air superiority is losing.
The straight remains closed. Because let's be blunt: if we can't reliably fly a F-15E or A-10 in the region, there's no way an oil company is going to bet its crew and cargo.
Honestly the best situation here is that Iran merely decides to toll the straight. That's "losing" too, but at least one with a merely "large financial overhead" on international energy traffic instead of a disastrous 15% off the top cut in capacity.
Iran is winning. This is the difference between tactics and strategy.
In a practical sense, from the perspective of the world as a whole, sure. It's also true that it leaves Iran in a much more powerful position than they held before the war[1]. So it's a "loss", strategically.
It's uncomfortable to admit given the context, but the truth is that the Islamic Republic of Iran really is a terrible state, both to its own people and its neighbors, and a much wealthier Iran represents a genuine threat to world peace on its own.
[1] To wit: "This is Our Water now. Pay us what we want. Don't like it? Come bomb us again and see how your oil markets like that. We can take it. You soft infidels can't, and we proved that already. Now it's $4/barrel, btw." Imagine that delivered on Truth Social for more ironic impact. It's Trump bluster, but with actual teeth.
The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
building all of this military infrastructure at the expense of living conditions for its people
Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
US welfare system seems to contain a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board, so this will be a good chance to cleanse the system of fraud.
Taking money from social programs and piling into the military which contains "a lot of fraud, waste, abuse and grift across the board", certainly is a choice. Sort of the opposite of a smart choice, but definitely a choice for sure.
> The US has lost mutiple KC-125 tankers and an E3 as well, although those were destroyed ont he ground rather than shot down.
Which makes them irrelevant here in this discussion but sure yea. Russia (those sneaky guys who invaded Ukraine and are being supplied by Iran) provide targeting information to Iran, Iran has missiles, we can't shoot them all down, and here we are. It's unfortunate but that's what happens in a war. Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
> Just yesterday, Trump was talking about another $1.5 trillion for defense in the coming fiscal year, and saying the US can't afford things like daycare, medicare etc.
We can easily afford both, but we choose not to because our political system is full of morons and corruption, but instead of Iran being more like the US and being dysfunctional in this regard, it should be more like Norway (excluding population differences) and pump and sell the oil and do so for the benefit of their citizens instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
> Iran's military budget as a % of GDP has historically been inthe low single digits:
Figures provided here are inaccurate and don't account for spending on proxy groups, for example.
> Frankly, these are very good lessons learned by the United States and they're going to come in handy if we end up in another war.
This is an interesting take given that the US seems to have ignored many of the most important lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
As for "end up in another war", the language you chose is very revealing. You don't just "end up in...war". Wars don't start themselves. Someone starts them and in the case of the US, it's almost always the US.
> we don't care what militarily irrelevant countries think about our activities because, well, we don't and they don't matter and we don't really care what they think.
America has its own oil. Europe is buying it, which increases the price.
To lower prices, America can help Europe get their oil back from the strait or it can ban sales to Europe both of which could make American oil cheap for Americans.
By not helping, Europe is screwing Americans. And, pretty soon, screwing Europeans too because Americans will be fed up with high prices. They will move to stop exports.
But the US already buys only 8% of it's oil from the Middle East. How long do you think they will care to help people that don't want to help themselves? It's more likely they will stop selling to Europe.
If I had to guess, I think American oil companies that operate in the strait selling oil to Europe are the only reason the US is still working so hard to control the strait. It's a lot of money on the table. But it's certainly not for Americans, just for a few rich American oil companies and their European customers.
1. Oil is a global market. Global supply and demand affects prices everywhere.
2. Oil isn't the only commodity that is at stake here. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted the global helium supply, for instance, and helium is used in critical products Americans need.
3. Asia relies heavily on oil and other commodities that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Asia is the factory of the world and manufactures tons of the goods that are exported to the US, from clothing to electronics. Obviously, an energy crisis in Asia has the potential to disrupt American supply chains.
4. The petrodollar system creates artificial demand for US dollars. This is a massive financial and soft power benefit to the US. If Atlas shrugs and the petrodollar system starts going away, the rebalancing/recalibration that takes place is not going to be very pleasant for Americans.
1. So the US is responsible for reclaiming a global market by itself? Or is the US required to be terrorized for 4 decades as a sacrifice for the global market?
2. And Europe doesn't need any?
3. But not European supply chains?
4. That's probably true. So the US is required to serve the EU with its military because the EU is their customer? I can think of several ways that the US can keep this position without the strait. But it's much more expensive for Europeans.
1. "Reclaiming" what? The president of the US, without Congressional approval, decided to launch a war against Iran. He broke it and now, like a petulant child, he wants everyone else to help him fix it. There was no credible evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat to the US. Virtually all of Iran's actions against the US in the past 40 years involved targets in the Mideast and once again, the history explains why Iran and the US aren't friends. In addition to the fact that the US was instrumental in the 1953 coup and supporting the Shah's brutal dictatorship that terrorized millions of Iranians, let's not forget that the US provided significant aid to Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War and it's pretty much accepted as fact in the Arab world that the Iran-Iraq War was a US design. Bottom line: the US needs to accept responsibility for creating the very environment that it says threatens it.
2. Europe didn't launch a war against Iran. They are obviously going to suffer (like everyone else in the world) but that doesn't mean they have an obligation to allow the president of the US to effectively commandeer their resources to clean up the mess he made.
3. Of course it affects European supply chains. It's going to affect everyone on the planet basically. But again, Europe didn't launch this war. Why do you seem to think they have a moral obligation to get involved in what virtually everyone in the world sees for what it is (a foolish war started by the US and Israel)?
4. The US isn't required to do anything. Your perspective seems to be that the US is God's gift to the world and everyone else is just freeloading. Another perspective is that alliances like NATO, the petrodollar system, etc. have been the sources of America's outsize economic, political and military power post-WW2. In my opinion, Americans have no idea what is coming as Pax Americana dies. It's not going to be pretty and I believe it is an existential threat to the way of life Americans have come to expect.
It's funny your link starts in 1979. Perhaps you should read about what the US did in Iran before that.
Here's a teaser: in 1953, the US and UK instigated a coup that overthrew the Prime Minister of Iran. The goal: keep Iran from nationalizing British oil interests.
The coup put the country in the hands of the Shah, who was basically a pro-Western dictator.
In 1957, the Shah set up SAVAK, which was basically secret police. Per Wikipedia:
> According to a declassified CIA memo citing a classified U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, the CIA played a significant role in establishing SAVAK, providing both funding and training. The organization became notorious for its extensive surveillance, repression, and torture of political dissidents. The Shah used SAVAK to arrest, imprison, exile, and torture his opponents, leading to widespread public resentment. This discontent was leveraged by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile, to build popular support for his Islamic philosophy.
Also EU can be reached and bombed by Iran so we have more to loose than some army bases in the desert like you guys. I assure you that Europeans wouldn't support getting bombed because we had to help Trump make more money.
Also, let's not forget that most of the people responsible for murdering ten thousand protesters a few weeks ago are now dead. No matter what else happens in this war, that is an excellent precedent.
Vietnam. We "won the peace." Sure, after 50k casualties, in a war that never mattered. Primarily "won the peace" because Vietnam was neighbors with China (even fought a war) and wanted to reach out to the west. BTW, Vietnam is still communist, and goodness, the dominoes didn't fall after Saigon.
Iraq. A functioning parliament. Sure. This is a country barely held together. And thousands upon thousand died in our invasion and its aftermath. And $1.5 trillion sure would go far today (adjusted for inflation).
Afghan. "So you cut your losses." Afghanistan is a complete wreck, a graveyard of empires. Trillions spent there, so many lives lost for almost nothing.
Iran. "We're not going to like invade...though we could." Iran is physically huge and has 90 million people. The idea that the US could invade and occupy without a tremendous cost is just a fantasy of neocons. And they'll naturally assemble a more "reasonable government" just because we blow their shit up. When has this ever worked?
The US hasn't really been the world's policeman since WW2. Almost all of its interventions have been mildly corrupt if not outright. Even Desert Storm wasn't a necessary fight. Who really cared about the Kuwaitis? Only the threat that Saddam would continue into Saudi Arabia motivated the West.
> Vietnam - actually has great relations with the US and we won the peace.
Ironically, I used to teach English in Vietnam and my wife is Vietnamese.
The US didn't win anything. What Americans call the "Vietnam War" was and is called the American War in Vietnam. The country was absolutely decimated and left with scars that are still healing today (see for instance Agent Orange). After the US fled the country, it continued to wage what amounted to an economic war against Vietnam, excluding it from the global economy. Into the 90s, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the world. My wife's parents had relatives who survived the war only to starve to death after the war.
Vietnam, largely because of its geography, is a very smart and pragmatic country. It's the only country in the world that has comprehensive strategic relationships with the US, China and Russia.
Relations between the US and Vietnam are good because Vietnam's "bamboo diplomacy" policy allows it to leverage its unique position to extract benefit from all of the superpowers. Relations are not good because of US exceptionalism.
> The US usually starts the war because the US is the only country in the world actually trying to do anything about nefarious actors.
The good old, "I had to beat my wife because she wasn't acting right!"
> Iraq - well they had Saddam and now they have a functioning parliament and things seem to be going a lot better for them.
An estimated 300,000 to 1 million Iraqis died as a result of the war. But yeah, they have a parliament and "things seem to be going a lot better for them."
> Afghanistan - We wanted to provide schooling for little girls and stuff like that and, well, the population didn't want it. So at some point you cut your losses.
Do you actually believe anything you write? The US went into Afghanistan to get bin Laden and attempt to eliminate Afghanistan's role as a safe haven for Al Qaeda. Ironically, through Operation Cyclone, the US directly supported militant Islamic groups during the Soviet war, and where do you think the Taliban came from?
> Iran - We're not going to like invade and occupy Iran, though we could. We're just going to have to keep blowing up their military capabilities until they have a more reasonable government.
Iran has about 4 times the land area and double the population of Iraq. Given the amount of debt the US has and Trump's ecstatic destruction of Pax Americana by defecating on all of America's most important alliances, I think the most optimistic scenario is that the cost of making the Persian Empire again would be the collapse the American Empire.
> Vietnam - actually has great relations with the US and we won the peace.
They won the peace (and the war). You didn't win shit. You lost, badly. The wound in the American psyche by this defeat will never heal, to the point we have to witness claims such as yours.
> Afghanistan - We wanted to provide schooling for little girls and stuff like that and, well, the population didn't want it. So at some point you cut your losses.
So you lost. Mainly because you went on a military adventure, with unclear goals, with a population you didn't understand. Much like in Vietnam!
And here you are, in Iran.
I think the one lesson you did learn is to heavily control the media and the narrative. Body bags and mission failures are bad press. Lesson learned.
US is providing targeting information, weapons and money for ukraine... it seems totally fair that russia is providing the same info for iranians, hopefully they (and china) will send them some weapons too.
> instead of this authoritarian rah rah death to America and death to Israel nonsense.
After US and israel bombing them.... again... what do you think, will there be more or less "death to US" chants? Also, considering the number of dead people in iran, lebanon, palestine and other countries, the next step is probably special force work in US... the ones you guys call "terrorists".
Good lessons. Like ignoring previous military plans that showed how tough a nut Iran would be to crack.
Lessons like the value of AWACs. Now we're down to 15 and the availability rate is like 50%. So 8 or so WORLDWIDE. Yeah, that's a good lesson. And we've cancelled its replacement after someone (probably Elon) whispered BS into Trump's ear about space based sensors.
I'm sure China is watching with a notepad out about all these lessons. Thucydides is rolling in his grave.
I’m reading one of those Blackhawks was shot down. An A-10, F-16, and a refueling plane, in addition to the F-15 so far today. Which, if true, is not a good sign.
We must be using different definitions for ‘complete’. I think Iran is using loitering anti-air missiles with IR seeking which seems to be effective. Maybe this sudden spike is reflective of receiving new equipment from China.
> Yes the US probably is still using precision weapons because, well, unlike the Iranian government we don't want to use so-called dumb munitions and indiscriminately bomb civilians or civilian targets.
Are you referring to the "precision" weapons that hit the girls' school?
The us has air dominance but not air supremacy, which is why missiles are mostly used rather than bombs with gps kits, requiring to get much closer.
And the US has been very keen to bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure, along with Israelis, since the start of the war [0]. The US-Israelis are guilty of war crimes.
The recent bombing of an unfinished bridge is another example of the US-Israeli actions, especially since they did a double-tap to kill rescuers. [1]
One could argue that the IRGC, much like Hamas, purposely builds military headquarters and other facilities near hospitals, schools, and civilian infrastructure precisely to use civilians as human shields.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. It is completely expected to lose aircraft in an operation of this scale, against an opponent with this level of sophistication. People put way too much stock in all of these modern stealth systems and whatnot. Stealth, for example, is a buzzword. It will give a slight edge, but it's not going to make your aircraft completely invisible and unshootable.
We got through it in 2022. We can get through it again.
Though unfortunately Americans will learn the wrong lesson from this which should be to reduce dependency on oil for every day life. We should be aiming to have fewer cars and abandon car-only transportation as policy, and more sidewalks, trams, bike lanes, and better medium density mixed-use development. But if folks want to have Ford F-250s and drive 15 miles for a loaf of bread, you have to care about the Straight of Hormuz which Iran could threaten to shut down anytime and as they continued to strengthen their military capabilities increasingly likely to shut down in the future.
-edit-
Also to be clear EVs aren't the answer either. Can't be dependent on China for rare earth mineral processing, still doesn't solve c02 emissions, still have traffic and all the negative externalities.
The rare earth dependency on China is very much overblown. The U.S. has very significant natural reserves of rare earth minerals. The problem is the same with all mining - it's uneconomic to mine minerals in the U.S. because the job of "miner" is unattractive to Americans (both the laborers and the governments that sign environmental permits) when there are cleaner, safer, and more highly paid jobs available.
They're also just as much of a CO2 solution as electric trains are, i.e. it depends on the fuel source for the local electric grid (which today is overwhelmingly solar in most of the places where EVs are popular).
We're dependent on processing and refining, not the minerals themselves. Takes, from what I understand, 10-15 years to stand up that capability.
Overall EVs are great and all and that's what I have, but they're not addressing the underlying concerns and sticking with car-only or car-based infrastructure whether that's ICE or EV is a losing proposition.
> They're also just as much of a CO2 solution as electric trains are,
No, you need fewer electric trains to move much more people plus you don't replace the trains as often, &c, and then add in all the miles and miles of paved roads you need, parking lots, you name it. There's no way around this, if you care about the environment or care about human wellbeing you have to move away from car-only infrastructure like the US has and move toward more European models. And no, the geography isn't a challenge, most people live in urban areas in the United States, China is big too, and so forth.
10-15 years to stand up legacy refining capability, which is heavy in pollution.
China invested decades into research and has made significant progress in extra refined, four nines purity rare earth minerals, required for advanced industries.
They may be two decades+ ahead of US at least, plus the talent pipeline
Sure no disagreement there - I think that just strengthens my point. Though I don’t think they are really 2 decades ahead because we can just start stealing their research and reverse engineering products as we see fit.
Another good lesson could potentially be that going to war as a sideshow to distract from a news cycle that threatened people in power is not the best choice for the world at large.
The people who are benefiting from that distraction are not the same who are being harmed by the distraction. The leaders seem to be quite okay with these turn of events.
I agree that we should abandon car-only transportation and instead move cars much further down the transit hierarchy. Ideally we would be relying on trains, bikes, and buses for most daily movement, using cars as needed instead of by default. But,
> still doesn't solve c02 [sic] emissions
This is incorrect. It doesn't magically make the entire grid carbon neutral but it does let us use much more efficient forms of power generation to make the electricity, and electric cars themselves do not emit CO2 (Carbon with 2 Oxygen). Effectively, switching to electric cars would remove cars themselves as a source of CO2 and make decarbonization much much easier.
> aiming to have fewer cars and abandon car-only transportation as policy,
impossible in the US due to (sub)urban sprawl. The only way to get rid of car-only mode is to get rid of suburban sprawl and put people back into dense Eastern European style commieblocks.
Also it is impossible in the US due to market economy. People will inevitable have to commute long distance to reach job sites or customers. Eastern commieblocks could solve that because people worked in large industrial factories, and there were only a handful of factories per town, and one downtown, and all routes were predetermined and planned.
car-only mode is the expression of the American Dream (tm), that you can live in your SFH in a burb, and hop into your personal car any second and go anywhere you want. It is the Ultimate Freedom (tm) and anything else is a significant downgrade in a lifestyle
We certainly face headwinds and challenges and we will never be totally free of suburbs or anything - even Europe has those, but we can make great progress in specific areas and to your point leverage market efficiency to drive the progress we need to make as a country. When I think about my hometown of Columbus I think about the hundreds of acres of surface parking lots, those can be converted to economically useful land with shops, small-scale workshops, housing of various types, offices, and more. And by doing so we can build up appropriate density without too much of a challenge. Younger folks than me are clamoring for better living conditions - we should make it happen. That doesn’t mean we abandon cars or anything - I like mine, but with better building patterns we can reduce the burden on everyone to have to buy all this stuff just to get a loaf of bread, go to school, or any other normal daily activities. Then we can make more use of our existing infrastructure instead of building more and then not being able to afford to maintain it (state DOTs are big jobs programs and they build even if they don’t need to so that they don’t have to lay people off - biggest scam in the USA and maybe the world).
There’s a really well known photo of Amsterdam before and after their car-first infrastructure. I can try to find it later but if you search for it, you could find it pretty easily I think. You’ll know it when you see it and it’ll blow your mind.
> Oil is still underpriced wrt to its environmental cost.
This may well be true, but we still haven't found a better fuel. Sure, we have electric cars, but they are still too expensive for the masses, or impractical, e.g. for apartment dwellers. Besides, oil has countless other uses besides as fuel for vehicles.
Yes, and, the world would be better off if the price of oil were higher. We would produce less plastic crap and take fewer frivolous airplane trips and take more public transit. Our petroleum consumption is based on underpriced oil.
This could be an argument for investing in more reliable/higher capacity public transit systems though. Which would also likely result in a fair increase in public health from moving a bit more and possibly less polluted air going in an out of the lungs of the populace.
> This could be an argument for investing in more reliable/higher capacity public transit systems though.
Public transit is impractical outside of big urban centers. And even there, it's nearly always a nasty experience. This is why people who can afford it still drive or use taxis in cities.
You can't compare time, you need to compare sorties. There were only 5900 F15 sorties during the gulf war. It's not clear how many of the 8000 combat sorties sorties flown so far in the Iran war are with F15s, but it's almost certainly several thousand. Overall during the gulf war coalition forces suffered 52 fixed wing aircraft lost in combat over approximately 116,000 combat sorties.
Given Iran ought to have far better SAM systems than Iraq 35 years ago, this comparison doesn't seem in any way alarming.
For a more direct comparison, in the first 5 weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia flew approximately 7000 combat sorties and 22 fixed wing aircraft were shot down.
Look at the super-precise strike on the E-3 sentry that we have pictures of. We know at least one other was hit.
If Iran can do this with AWACS, they can do even more with the hundreds of fighter jets in Israeli and US bases (it's much easier to cover up the destruction of an F-15 or F-35). Once this war ends, I think we'll see that most of the aircraft kills are going to be on the ground.
It seems like the Iraqis were relatively poor operators of their systems. A few days ago I was reading about the Nato bombing of yugoslavia on wikipedia and it had the following entry:
"Yugoslav air defences were much fewer than what Iraq had deployed during the Gulf War – an estimated 16 SA-3 and 25 SA-6 surface-to-air missile systems, plus numerous anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) – but unlike the Iraqis they took steps to preserve their assets. Prior to the conflict's start Yugoslav SAMs were preemptively dispersed away from their garrisons and practiced emission control to decrease NATO's ability to locate them."
So their SAMs likely just got stealth bombed / bombed from a distance.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Why? We don't know exactly what happened but its easy to imagine that Iran held some anti-air systems in reserve for this phase of the war. They aren't trying to defend a target, their goal was likely to stay hidden and wait for an opportunity. They could keep the radar off and use a passive sensor network to notify them when it was in range, then turn the radar on to get a lock for the shot. Or even just IR. Recall, the Houthis gave stealth F35s some near misses over Yemen, no doubt supplied and trained by the Iranians.
It was pretty much a given that over time some of these airplanes would be shot down. There's no way to get every single MANPAD or even some of the larger anti-aircraft setups. A jet can even be brought down by a canon or a bullet given enough luck. We've had quite a few near misses, there's a video of an Israeli F-16 evading a surface to air missile, there have been the F-35 that was hit but managed to continue and land, there were countless drones shot down.
This was inevitable and just a question of time. Out of >10k sorties something is going to get hit. I've no idea what range the military planners expected and how we're doing vs. that.
Why would that not be a bad sign? The US declared victory several times, but clearly Iran still has plenty of firepower to shoot down planes, and probably also ships in the Strait. If the US is incapable of preventing Iran from shooting ships and planes, how do they intend to win this?
OP left a little to interpretation, but, I think, top of the list starts with 'mission accomplished 2.0' meme followed by increased US casualties ( though I suppose the exact order likely depends on your current disposition ).
> During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement.
was it because F-15 was used as superiority fighter at that time and now they use it as heavy bomber? I assume plenty of bombers likely was shot down in Iraq.
per wiki, f-15e was first produced in 1987, so there were very few in service at that time, and most of ground strikes were carried by other aircrafts.
Yes, most ground strikes were by other aircraft types, but the F-15E did have a lot of sorties, almost as many as the F-111 or F-4G (although the F-16 had many, many more sorties, but not all of them were air-to-ground)
Majority of the world prefers stability over United States bombing people’s homes in Middle East and elsewhere. The entire NATO is against this. Pointless aggression and war that serves no purpose other than economical and human loss needs to stop.
Additionally Iranians don’t support this, nor do they want their children getting killed by United States. Regardless of their issues with the government, they rally around the flag to defend their land.
So I would assume that “we” here represents majority of people in the world.
Have you considered not providing intel to Irak to allow them to use sarin gas against the Iranians? Or overthrowing their democratic regime that wanted an audit to understand how much of its oil was stolen by US companies? Or designating it as the "Axis of Evil" and sanctioning it after that it helped you invade Afghanistan? Or assassinating their religious leader during negociations?
Iran didn't become skeptic about the US overnight. I would advise to do some reading on wikipedia on the topic to make up your mind.
Iran sent missiles to countries hosting US military assets. I think that it's quite clear why they do it, unlike the US. They had also warned before hand that it would happen in the case of a US unprovoked aggression.
The Iranian government can suck and it can still be a net negative for the Iranian people to bomb the shit out of their civilian infrastructure and kill and bunch of schoolgirls.
The Iranian government sucks. There is zero chance that Trump is capable of leaving this conflict with a stable liberal democracy that protects the rights of the Iranian people in place.
That’s not what Iranians expect or are asking for. Every Iranian I’ve spoken to is thankful that Khamenei is now dead and there is at least a chance of change. They don’t expect Trump to fix their country for them. They want someone to help so their own government isn’t shooting them dead by the thousands in the streets.
They certainly have, but the general idea is to first use stealth jets to bomb defensive systems (including radar observability) to conquer the skies, and then you can fly around somewhat freely. While SAM technology has improved, so have America's observability and stealth bombing capabilities. It will be interesting to learn the context and sequence of events which led to an F-15 being shot down by enemy fire.
(In 1991, the United States relied on the F-117 Nighthawk to penetrate Baghdad and launch salvos against radar and SAM sites. Simultaneously, Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against similar communication and defense sites. In this war with Iran, the F-35 and B-2 have been used for stealth missions).
Recall that the Serbs shot down a Nighthawk when they were in a similar situation to Iran. They kept some good AA missiles in reserve and used a system of spotters and just waited for an opportunity. Its likely that similar tactics were used by Iran.
Also recall that the Houthis, armed and trained by Iran, gave F35s some close calls over Yemen.
The story is actually quite interesting. The Serbs observed that a nighthawk would routinely fly the same route but their radar couldn’t lock on it unless the missile hatch were open, which they managed to elicit.
In short, it took 2 rare events to occur for it to happen.
This isn’t unexpected for anyone in the actual military: they’ve planned for this for decades. A couple of friends served in the previous war and they mentioned that this is what their training exercises were like: same enemy, same difficulty.
Most of the F15 upgrades have been against other aircraft. The F15 is primarily an air superiority fighter, it isn’t designed for attacks or defence against ground forces. The F15E is modified to attack ground targets, but ideally they would be targets without any air defences.
The F-15E Strike Eagle variant is definitely designed for attacks and defense against ground forces, but overall air defense is a probability game so it's not too surprising that it eventually happened
Yes, although it’s designed for interdiction, rather than primarily a ground attack aircraft, the difference being that it’s intended to be used against defenceless ground targets (like supply lines), not on the front lines.
We have attacked their “legacy” air defense systems. We cannot really degrade their ability to use their anti-aircraft loitering missiles which don’t rely on radar.
What we can tell though is that Iran is still firing missiles (including cluster munitions) at Israel's civilians and at gulf states. So the ground facts are that it can still do that.
We also have to remember that Iran has a large number of different missile systems for different ranges. It's mostly not the same missiles they are firing at the nearby gulf states as they are firing into Israel. Some of the longer range missile systems they have need to be fired from western Iran to make it to Israel. There's a lot of other nuance, solid fuel vs. liquid fuel, mobile vs. fixed launchers etc.
I don't think we'll see anything close to reliable reporting any time soon.
The story of whether Iran had a nuclear program has been reported every which way but loose for the past 6 months.
By the time Trump started pushing that they were close to a nuke again, those that claimed he was wrong 6 months ago and the nuclear program was intact. Had started claiming it was in fact destroyed.
Gosh that sentence is hard enough to write, but the story is so contolvuted I don't think I can improve it.
That Iran had a nuclear program was not in dispute. It was regulated under international supervision based on the terms of Obama's agreement with Iran, which Trump promptly tore up because he has the mental capacity of a fourth-grader.
That Iran was on the verge of building bombs was far from clear. Khameini had previously issued a fatwa against doing so, on the grounds that it would be haram, or un-Islamic. All signs suggest that the IRGC was operating in full compliance with that fatwa.
I'm sure the remnants of his administration regret that now.
But the JCPOA had some big issues with it. It was time bound- that is it only delayed Iran's program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_nuclear_deal ) and Iran got sanctions relief in return that allowed it to fund its proxies and pursue other activities not constrained by the agreement (such as its ballistic missile program, drones etc.).
Iran also restricted IAEA access to military sites while the agreement was in effect.
That's a fascinating insight into what friends of Bibi can do with photoshopped text on long range photos.
Doesn't include any 256 channel multi spectral radiometric data from ground level crystal packs though ... I guess they didn't show much of interest in the gamma spectrum.
We have two competing theories. One is that Israel is making everything up. The other is that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. At least the second one seems to have some evidence backing it up like secret underground facilities with centrifuges, enriched material, and yes, that warehouse in Tehran. The theory that Israel is making everything up doesn't seem that well supported.
A confidential report, seen by the BBC, did not say exactly where the site was. But inspectors are believed to have taken samples from a location in Tehran's Turquzabad district.
That is the area where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged Iran had a "secret atomic warehouse". "
"VIENNA (Reuters) - Samples taken by the U.N. nuclear watchdog at what Israel's prime minister called a "secret atomic warehouse" in Tehran showed traces of uranium that Iran has yet to explain, two diplomats who follow the agency's inspections work closely say."
...
"Those traces were, however, of uranium, the diplomats said - the same element Iran is enriching and one of only two fissile elements with which one can make the core of a nuclear bomb. One diplomat said the uranium was not highly enriched, meaning it was not purified to a level anywhere close to that needed for weapons.
"There are lots of possible explanations," that diplomat said. But since Iran has not yet given any to the IAEA it is hard to verify the particles' origin, and it is also not clear whether the traces are remnants of material or activities that predate the landmark 2015 deal or more recent, diplomats say."
Iran has been pursuing nuclear deterrence by enriching for decades, the entire time I've been in and out of the country. That's a given.
Bibi and his tales that Iran is just a week away from an actual working bomb has been going on almost as long. Bibi - the guy with a secret / not secret collection of bombs.
The question of whether or not Iran was playing along sufficiently with inspectors when there was an inspection deal in place is what we are talking about here.
IMHO they weren't getting away with much, at that time Israel was making up claims that they were and media blasting.
That is all times past, of course.
It's also clear that once Trump tore up the deal they went (sensibly in light of everything it seems) back to unchecked enrichment, and now that they've been attacked during negotiations there's zero trust and it would seem certain that there is a real risk that reinvigorated hard core fanatics will set a bomb off in either Israel and / or the US.
Isn’t this just weapons of mass destruction again circa Iraq 25 years ago? We had evidence back then also, it turned out to be fabricated. Are you sure Netanyahu didn't just need a big distraction to prevent from being impeached and sent to jail? And Trump didn't need a huge distraction from the whole Epstein thing? Because this war come out of nowhere and was way too convenient for them.
"By the early 2000s, two key clandestine facilities were nearing completion: a uranium enrichment center at Natanz (in central Iran), built to house thousands of centrifuges, and a heavy water production plant alongside a 40 MW heavy-water reactor (IR-40) near Arak. These facilities, which had been kept secret from the IAEA, were intended for ostensibly civilian purposes but had clear weapons potential. Enrichment at Natanz could yield high-enriched uranium for bombs, while the Arak reactor (once operational) could produce plutonium in its spent fuel, and the heavy water plant would supply the reactor's coolant.[41] In August 2002, an exiled Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), exposed the existence of Natanz and Arak.[41] Satellite imagery soon confirmed construction at these sites. The revelation that Iran had built major nuclear facilities in secret, without required disclosure to the IAEA, ignited an international crisis and raised questions about the program's true aim.[41]"
People who are pro the Iranian regime claim that there was a religious order against building nuclear weapons. But at the same time there is no other explanation as to why Iran would enrich Uranium to 60% as that has virtually no other use. It also seems they were working on other components related to weaponiztion (though admittedly we have less confirmation/visibility into that). Ofcourse the precise timing of when they would chose to build those weapons and their intent is not that easy to guess but it's also not unreasonable to assume they would do so when they felt it would be to their advantage.
But everyone agrees that they have enriched >400kg of Uranium to a level that has no other purpose than nuclear weapons and that the remaining steps of enrichment are measured in days/weeks.
So something doesn't add up in what your references are saying. What is your explanation of the discrepancy?
Why in the world would Iran be expected to remain in compliance with the JCPOA after 2018, when Trump tore it up?
As I recall, they did remain in compliance for another year after that, given that it was originally supposed to be a multilateral agreement. But IMHO they should have put everything they had into refinement and weapons production as soon as Trump unilaterally ripped up the agreement. Instead they held back, and they are now seeing the result of that mistake.
None of this would be happening if Iran had actually done what Israel assured us they were doing.
You're asking why wouldn't they pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them? Why should they? Don't you think as a country they should have some other priorities? Like ensuring Tehran has water? So because Trump tore up the agreement (and the US was sanctioning them anyways for their ballistic missile program and other reasons) that's somehow justification? Trump tore up the agreement because it would enable them to get there anyways and Iran refused to sign an agreement that would prevent them from getting there.
The JCPOA would have expired in 2025 anyways assuming that they even meant to observe it in the first place.
Your last statement isn't as solid as you think it is. Iran hasn't gotten to a point where they have nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles not because they didn't want to but because they were unable to get to that or were concerned that getting closer would invite the same attack we're seeing today.
Maybe Israel and the US wouldn't be attacking a country where stepping on US and Israeli flags, chants of death to America and death to Israel, calling Israel little Satan and the US big Satan. Building an arsenal of ballistic missiles and trying to get to a nuclear bomb? (and I mean the list goes on and on).
They need nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles so they can murder with impunity without risk of retribution. A regime that conducts public executions in stadiums, or mows down 10's of thousand of their own citizens who dare to protest, or give people plastic keys to heaven to walk into minefields: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_key_to_paradise or beat up woman on the streets to death for not wearing a hijab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Mahsa_Amini (and this list also goes on and on) can't be allowed to act with impunity.
Maybe had the US not upended their parliamentary democracy with a coup to grab their oil, they would have continued to maintain their earlier friendly relations with Israel.
Burning US flags and calling for death to blacks has been a KKK thing. We did not bomb them collectively, or break their infra, when they got their guns because their expressions were considered free speech. Individual transgressions of law were pursued (once in a while).
Oh shucks! military intelligence and 19 different intelligence gathering agencies are such nincompoops that they completely missed what an expert HN commenter of sparkling genius pointed out.
I don't have the expertise to know what use its for, but I suspect the agencies assesment was informed bybthe knowledge of 60% enriched uranium.
It's used for subs btw and maybe they felt they needed a nuclear one to secure Hormuz.
I get it. So according to you Iran is building nuclear subs. JFYI it takes 4-5Kg of material for a nuclear sub reactor. So according to you they're building 100 nuclear submarines.
Got it genius. But hey, by the trust you put in Joe Kent and Tulsi Gabbard we already knew you were a genius. Didn't need the additional observation about Iran building 100 nuclear submarines to secure Hormuz.
I have no F'ing clue what Iran wants to do. But I know that the intelligence agencies are well equipped and experienced to guess that, especially more than 'that guy on the internet '.
I do a mild bit of environmental geophysical radiometrics, that took me to Iran decades ago - it's not a new thing, they've been edging having nuclear deterrance for a good while.
Trump ripped up the monitoring agreement - that was unquestionably stupid.
He attacked Iran during talks to get that back on track .. that was unbelievably stupid (see: current world state).
Had he agreed to have in country monitoring again and had the USofA simply waited it was probable the old hard line core would have withered in time.
That's certainly not on the table now, the fanatics are dug in and feel fully justified. On both sides.
Seems to me their strategy is to shut down the Strait as cheaply as possible, force ground operations on known strategic points of interest, then just missile and drone strike Americans in Iranian territory where they have ~no air defense.
There are 4 players in this war and they all have very different goals and "victory" conditions.
1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;
2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;
3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and
4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.
Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.
You forgot the 5th actor - Russia - which is benefiting hugely from the collapse of NATO, the loosening of oil sanctions, the huge hike in oil prices, and the way the US was persuaded to expend a ridiculous percentage of its conventional missile stockpiles on a pointless project.
Ukraine is doing its best to minimise Russian oil exports, and that's certainly having an effect.
But strategically, Russia is a huge beneficiary of this mess.
It depends where you draw the line. The extended players include:
1. Russia (as you say): I think this war of choice virtually guarantees a settlement of the Ukraine war along the current borders. At some point Europe will need to ease their energy crisis with Russian oil and gas. Well done, everybody, the system works;
2. Europe: like the GCC they are finding US security guarantees and the NATO protection racket aren't what they were sold. Pax Americana was an illusion. I've elsewhere predicted this is going to lead to arms and tech nationalism within Europe. It's actually a race between fascism taking over Europe and Europe divorcing itself from the US and I suspect fascism is currently winning; and
3. China: the biggest wineer of all this. China is still receiving Iranian oil exports. In fact, the US "punished" Iran by lifting oil sanctions, allowing Iran to sell oil to China at market rates instead of below market (because of the sanctions). Again, well done, everybody; and
4. Asia: this has exposed their weakness of imported oil, particularly Thailand, Vietnam and the Phillipines. I would not be surprised if this war of choice is the turning point that leads to a China-cenetered Asian security compact.
In one year, the US has essentially torn up the entire post-1945 rules-based international order, which it designed for its own benefit.
China's bigger win is the future demand for solar, batteries, EVs, induction stoves (replace LPG/LNG), all things electric and energy storage. There were plans to shut down the oversupply of solar, but now there must be a huge demand.
I think this war is actually pushing many away from fascism. Trump was the reference for a lot of the European right and this is showing people he was terrible and, by extension, embarrassing them all.
Heck, Orbán is currently running an electoral campaign as "the candidate of peace".
My impression is that the fascists in Europe are trying to break up with the US too. So it's not "either or".
But I know one thing: we re going to see a rush into implementing renewables after this that will look like a post-war policy. What is also bad news for he GCC.
The post-1945 rules-based order was already a slow motion train crash that most of the West remained in denial about until Putin wiped his behind with it in the 2014 invasion of Crimea. To pretend that Trump is somehow breaking an otherwise intact system at this point is fanciful.
The post-1945 order was dead after the NATO's war in Yugoslavia in 1999, and the subsequent recognition of Kosovo. At the very latest.
One coulld argue that it happened earlier, for example after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, or after the annexation of East Germany.
Really, any rival state-level actor benefits from seeing America squander its currently limited supply of high-end munitions and put months of stress on its airframes, warships, and people.
Russia needs its energy sources for its own war, too. Energy getting more expensive globally, while UA reducing the supply by targeting RU production, is a double edged sword. RU is now putting bans on export of some fuels, etc. Whether EU turning into a defense alliance with sole focus on RU, while taking in all lessons from UA war (without having to deal with US pressure to buy its expensive state of the art military HW which may not be all that effective in the potential drone war) is great for russia is also questionable.
> The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.
Saudi and the UAE don't want the pre-war status quo, they want America to bomb Iran back to the stone age so it can't continue missile or launcher production.
UAE wants that because their leaders are highly Israel aligned. Saudi Arabia is a lot more pragmatic, they take their role as the "leader" of the Islamic world pretty seriously.
Pre-war views were very much the status-quo was better than starting a war.
Now that a war is started it has to be finished or the GCC is left far worse off with Iran in a much stronger strategic position in the region despite a decimated military.
> Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator
Iran ("the regime") was never a good faith actor or negotiator. Their position was something like "we won't develop nuclear weapons as long as we have free reign to torture our own citizens and fund violent groups that destabilize regional governments". And still marched on enriching uranium anyway.
There's nothing to trust on either side. This war was eventually going to happen, I'm just disappointed that it happened under such incompetent leadership in the US.
> Their position was something like "we won't develop nuclear weapons as long as we have free reign to torture our own citizens and fund violent groups that destabilize regional governments"
This is unfortunately the best possible outcome. Nuclear weapons have been around for 80 years now. They are quite achievable by modern states, and they are obviously the only path to sovereignty. Ukraine, North Korea, and Iran have affirmed it.
Bombing a country in pursuit only reaffirms this logic, especially after agreements have already been made or negotiations are under way.
The only path forward, for Iran and everyone else, has been established and stable since ~1945: give people major concessions in exchange for the major concession that they will not try to achieve true sovereignty via nuclear weapons.
Every attempt to bomb or coerce someone off of the nuclear trajectory just increases the motivation (globally) to pursue it with more vigor and more secrecy.
We're on this tightrope until we fall off it, no other options.
The war absolutely did not need to happen. Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon and was fully complying with the jcpoa. It's mostly the US and Israel that have acted I'm bad faith.
Most countries in the region torture their citizens, even Israel except it's Palestinians, because it's a racist apartheid state.
Let's not pretend we care about funding terrorists when it's the US that has the biggest supporter of terrorism in the last 70 years.
Iran doesn't torture its citizens. At least, no more, than, let's say, Arabia Saudi. You don't say it explicitly, but the implication is clear that the US is doing this because 'human rights'. A week ago was to save the poor Iranians, and now is to bring the country to the stone age. The fact is that US is 7000 miles from Iran and have not business being there.
The one country 'destabilizing the region' is not Iran.
Wow, I can't believe someone would say this. In January, they basically killed tens of thousands of us with machine guns. After the war, the first thing they did was cut off the internet to prevent an internal uprising. They deployed many Basij checkpoints with machine guns just to warn Iranians.
This is a sample scene, don't you consider it torture?
I don't care why the incompetent leaders of the US are doing what they're doing. A bunch of unelected murderers just got dead. I consider that a positive improvement in the world, and I wish it happened more often.
The world is pretty small these days. Mass murderers are everyone's business. It's morally offensive to just say "well that's a long ways away, not my problem".
But at the same time, this war may have allowed IRGC to dig in. They've replaced a few people but the system may be stronger. Never mind that it doesn't even seem to be the administration's communicated goal to destroy IRGC in the first place.
On top of all that, they've threatened to reduce the entire country to the "stone age", and have started to target civilian industries.[0] If this campaign continues, how is this anything less than mass murder?
They're not doing this war for the reason you seem to want. They're not doing this to save Iranians.
How many civilian deaths as the direct result of US/Israel action do you consider acceptable to achieve killing the unelected murderers? 150 school children? Wikipedia cites hundreds more civilian deaths, but I don't know what sources to believe. How many layers of the regime's onion do we have to peel before we know we got all the murderers? How many children are we going to radicalize into future unelected murderers by murdering their family members and plunging their region into worse chaos? Should we kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out? Hegseth has crusader tattoos. Is he just another unelected theocratic murderer of a different stripe? Are we the baddies?
We had a deal and we tore it up. More than once, if you include the inciting incident of undermining a democratically-elected leader who was bringing the central player in the Middle East into the mainstream economic and political global order that America had set for everyone. "Not like that!"
Frankly, it's hubris all the way down. Kalief Browder.
A deal that allows the regime to murder thousands of their own citizens and export violence to the whole region really isn't worth it. Yeah not having overt conflict in that region makes our gas cheaper. But it doesn't make me sleep better.
Maybe I agree with you that the US, in 1953, planted the seeds for this situation. If I could punish the people responsible I would, but they're all dead now. Also, doesn't our historic involvement give us some moral obligation to fix it?
In this context good faith means not saying you're here to negotiate only to stall for time while you're secretly planning to invade the other country in the background, which is exactly what the US did. So Iran has no reason to take US "negotiations" seriously ever again.
I don't think we do. I think this is our Teutoburg Forest moment [1].
Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war (eg [2][3][4]). They just oppose the way it was initiated. In other words, they have a process objection not a policy objection.
I've seen lamenting over Harris losing the elction (as well as more than a few doing "stolen election") about how the world could be different. But US foreign policy is uniparty
> Part of the issue is there's no real opposition in the US to what's going on. The Democrats being the controlled opposition party aren't in opposition to the war
Most emphatically yes. We've seen occasional bursts of spirited dissent but that's about it. As far as sustained opposition, it still seems that they're hoping to just wait out the clock for things to go back to "normal".
> But US foreign policy is uniparty
No, I'd say even with this senseless "war" the "uniparty" model has still become invalid with Trump. While the US fear industry ("news media") has been beating the drums against Iran for quite some time, the US military/intelligence community has resisted attacking. If we had a President Harris, I would bet that we would not be attacking Iran, especially in this manner - not because of Harris herself, but rather because she wouldn't have gutted the domain experts who come up with reality-based plans, and who have presumably been saying "If we overtly attack Iran they close the Strait and actually end up stronger".
I like to refer to that system as bureaucratic authoritarianism - no meaningful checks on government power itself, but there are checks on how it's exercised. The critical difference is that Trumpism is autocratic authoritarianism (especially the second round after he broke so many laws the first time without consequence) - the experts and other group-project stakeholders (eg Inspectors General) were all fired (or at the very least sidelined), and replaced with glaringly incompetent yes-men who execute any simplistic "plan" regardless how bad it is.
Your “sources” are just mindless whataboutism that do not in any way provide evidence Harris/Democrats would have started this same idiotic war with Iran.
Democrats in Congress are currently almost universally opposed to the War in Iran. As the minority party they are unable to stop it unilaterally. Budget obstructions are the single lever available to them and given other issues like ICE, healthcare cuts, federal layoffs, can’t be used for every issue, every time without diffusing that very limited power into irrelevance.
Talk about “controlled opposition” given the blatantly obvious differences between the last two administrations is a signal of either being uninformed or a deliberate demotivational strategy.
Here are recent quotes from Schumer/Jefferies/Harris that for some reason you selectively chose not to include:
"Trump’s actions in Iran will be considered one of the greatest policy blunders in the history of our country," - Chuck Schumer
“The American people are sick and tired of the chaos, high costs and extreme Republican agenda. Donald Trump must end his reckless war of choice in the Middle East. Now.” - Hakeem Jefferies
“In the last 48 hours Donald Trump has dragged America into a war that we don’t want” - Kamala Harris
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chuck-schumer-hakeem-jeffries-more-024256513.html?guccounter=1
It'll partly depend on what internal housecleaning—or perhaps fumigation—and reform happens in the US.
While it is unlikely to occur, imagine the international effect if the US resoundingly impeached and removed of a lawless president, and Congress formalized a lot of international agreements into statute rather than delegating too much to the executive branch.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I think this was the nail in the coffin. Not only has the US exsanguinated their military capability at the behest of Israel, everyone with half a brain watched closely as they took AD out of the gulf states and moved them into Israel. Taiwan, Japan and South Korea are not morons, they will see the writing on the wall and they will move to make diplomatic peace with their neighbours (China) now that the US has keeled over with self-inflicted wounds.
It doesn't really matter what happens internally in the US now, everyone realizes that every four years the world will roll the dice.
That is not going to happen. Even if MAGA doesn't rig the midterms and the Democrats actually win something, they will just "reach across the aisle" and "work on healing our divided nation". Nobody will see any consequences for the suffering they caused.
A Constitutional Convention, by definition, would almost certainly not cause or require dissolution of the US. You could only effectively call a convention of people who explicitly do not want dissolution.
You forgot one huge players: popular revolutions. All muslims nations that are currently managed by western puppets dictors, every single one. The puppets know their population don't like what Israels and globally most western nations are doing in the middle east and thus tried hard to pretend they support the muslim world. But this war show clearly to their population who these puppets really serve. I bet few revolutions will shake the middle east soon, and those will be powerfull (I don't believe they will create mature democraties, as those things require centuries of progress but, they won't as easy to control). And those revolution won't be easely stolen like the previous one, also because Israel don't seem to realize it lost its support from western nations, it's just a matter a time it ends up on its own.
>> Doesn't break out anti-air, but Iran absolutely has a lot of teeth left.
With the price of oil having skyrocketed, and the new revenue that will be coming from the Hormuz tolls, they will also be rebuilding their previous capacity in no time.
1) The US has run 13,000 missions over Iran in the last month. Thats a lot of targets.
2) The initial US degradation of Iraqi capabilities was much much greater in gulf war 1.
3) F15s are not stealth fighters.
4) This is 35 years later.
5) "strategic bombing" of air defenses is mostly accomplished with our cruise missiles. We'll take out any air defenses we find, but you don't fly non-stealth planes over SAM batteries intentionally.
We haven't even started a ground campaign. If one plane is downed per 13000 missions, I think we're doing ok.
It’s very likely their initial shock now wore off, and they got resupplied by putin and xi. We might start seeing much more damage going forward. US hasn’t fought a proxy war of this kind in many decades.
It's difficult to compare; but Iran today is not Iraq then. F-15s are now based on a design that's 30 years older. Shoulder launched SAMs have moved on.
I'm not sure what happened here, but in the Gulf War, there was a move to medium altitudes after a dodgy first night and I've seen some footage that, if accurate and if I'm not getting it wrong, suggests there are different tactics going on here.
Iraq is pretty flat on the routes between the US-allied countries and the major strongholds (Basra, Baghdad). You can't easily conceal rocket launchers there.
Tehran is protected by mountain ranges that can provide plenty of cover. And Russia is probably feeding it the real-time radar data from its military bases in Armenia.
My concern is that other countries can aid Iran with weapons in a direct and indirect way. There is no guarantee to block the railroads from East and the shipments from North.
That's not a concern it's a reality. Iran is not shut-off or blockaded to any meaningful degree. It has tons of unmolested border crossings and Caspian sea access, and maintains full control within it's own borders (minus the parts that have been blown up).
Also ships are still transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from Iranian ports taking goods in from China, with who knows what on board. They are also exporting more oil now than they were before the war.
I mean special military operation, not war. Only congress can declare war.
Even the Philippines, a US ally, has struck a deal with Iran for safe passage. Meanwhile, Oman is working with Iran on a toll scheme. There's an emerging chance that no US-flagged vessel crosses the Straight of Hormuz again in our lifetimes (except maybe for a retreating 5th fleet).
The Philippines may be a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan, but they need to deal with Iran to keep the lights on. The rationing situation is quite bad in a lot of east Asian countries.
> a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan a US client state since MacArthur liberated them from Japan
And a US colony/territory for the 43 years before Japan invaded. They were ruled by a US puppet state in a supposed "transition to independence" at the time Japan invaded, however it's unclear how much actual independence they would have had in practice.
I mention this because:
1. The way you state it makes it sound like they were somehow independent before the war.
2. It explains why MacArthur was there with the US army to resist the Japanese invasion from the first day it happened (Dec 7, 1941)
3. Its history worth looking into to contextualize just how bad the US has always been at taking over places. Acting as if this is post WW2 (as the media does) is counter-productive to truly understanding the number of really botched invasions the US has done.
It’s done some pretty decent ones as well. Western Europe including West Germany, Japan, arguably South Korea although they went through a period of dictatorship, but all are staunch US allies. There have been failures too for sure. Over all of I was going to be invaded by somebody, with America at least there’s a chance it might be a least worst option.
Nothing of what you said (all wrong, btw) is relevant to the fact we attacked first and getting our butts kicked.
"The country that killed 30,000 progressive protestors in a few days."
Ya, if you believe this you're poorly informed. Where does this number come from? Who sourced it? What is their relationship to Western powers? How are they able to count so many Iranians dying in dungeons so well? How about the logistics of killing 30 000 people?
BS American propaganda. Kuwaiti babies redux.
Iranian progressives have one thing that unites them: they remember that the CIA deposed the only democratically elected, progressive, president and installed a brutally repressive "Shah". [1]
"The only real theocracy left in the world."
That would have to include Israel, an apartheid state along religious lines where the Chief Rabbinate decides who can get married.
"the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in history."
Not according to the State Department; Iran and proxies don't crack the top 10. Sunnis (ISIS, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, etc) loath Shia and are not coordinated by Iran.
"The Muslim country all other Muslim countries love to hate."
Nope, only Sunni Gulf states hate Iran. Mostly because their rulers are colonial mandarins; the best example is Bahrain, a majority Shia population ruled by foreign Sunni elite installed by the UK 100 years ago. The native Bahrainis loath their rulers.
"Wannabe North Korea."
Say what you will about N. Korea, it isn't getting attacked though.
[1] Shah in quotes because, as a monarchist myself, the deposed, CIA installed, Pahvali was the son of a deposed peasant and the father of a traitor (something, to be fair, the other two Pahlavis weren't).
Arab citizens of Israel have full rights. Unless you deny Palestinian statehood.
> Chief Rabbinate decides who can get married.
Only if Jewish.
> Don't crack the top ten
"Currently there are four countries designated under these authorities: Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Iran, and Syria."
46 airplanes were shot down during the second Iraqi war, and there has been over 150 total aviation losses (mechanical failure).
So far we have lost seven airplanes. There's no deep meaning behind one F-15e being shot down (if that's what happened): it's not a stealth aircraft and it's not heavily armored.
You can't really take out "the whole" air defense system because there will always be folks out with MANPAD-type things, those will score hits on occasion. That's probably what we saw here. I doubt MANPADs were nearly as common in the early 90s as they are today.
The videos we've seen match up with what we've seen on the ground. They are all running a custom software we haven't seen elsewhere and don't seem to be traditional MANPADS in any way.
We know Iran is driving around bongo trucks with small SAM systems on the back that use passive IRST rather than radar. The missiles themselves have the capability to cruise in the air for some period of time searching for a target before kicking in the engine for a last, fast sprint to the target. Because they are electro-optical (and piloted by a human), even early-warning and flare deployments won't do very much against a skilled operator.
True but without radar they have a relatively difficult task of being out there setup and waiting for a fast moving jet to pass within range.
Compare that to Ukraine defending it's skies with NATO (well mostly French IIRC) AWACS feeding early data which is what made MANPADS in Ukraine so effective against Russian attacks.
Yeah my guess was they were coming in along predictable routes at this point and that's what got them? I saw that the search and rescue mission was in an area close to water. I believe many Stinger hits in Ukraine can be attributed to predictability.
> An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.
Not to dispute that but what about the comparison makes it not a good sign? Iran has much more capable radar and missiles now than Iraq did 35 years ago, doesn't it?
The success of the war depends on the approval ratings of the US president which will almost certainly take hits when US military takes hits so the US citizens seeing the US military taking hits at a higher rate than relatively recent wars in the area is a bad sign for "winning" whatever "winning" means here.
They've been flying straight into sites that would normally be heavily defended with 4th gen airframes, it's not that surprising that Iran finally managed to get one
Iran's semi-official news agency (Tasnim) made the claim. Then a bit later they posted photos of the wreckage. OSINT community pieced together that it was actually wreckage of the F-15E that is the topic of this post.
A few minutes ago Tasnim posted photos of a separate wreckage that seems to be of an F-16 that was also downed today.
These events should not be confused with the F-35 that CNN reported was hit a few days ago.
CENTCOM claimed the F-35 made it made it back to base, but right after the hit happened, they sent out a Chinook to run search patterns in the area. Additionally, the pilot was treated for shrapnel wounds. As he's at the front of the plane, it wasn't some "near miss" like that really cool F-18 evasion (where it timed the break exactly and the shrapnel all blew past it).
CENTCOM has turned out to be about as honest as the Russian or Ukrainian MoD. They flat-out lied about this shootdown all while sending out search teams. There is some circumstantial evidence that two Blackhawks were damaged trying to run search and rescue operations. There are also stories coming out that they are using bureaucracy to hide massive numbers of casualties.
US also has A-10s doing gun runs in Iraq too. It makes sense the US is more willing to take risks 1-month into the war given how effective they've been and for Iran to also adapt their manpad teams after they probably failed a ton of times previously.
You saw the same pattern where Ukraine and Russia both constantly adapted on the battlefield and the war changed rapidly over the first year.
MANPADS have a range of around 4 miles. Most soldiers aren't carrying around armed MANPADS. They have to fetch the MANPADS, arm it, aim, and fire all before the jet dumps its load and flares before bailing out. Because of this, MANPADS are a much greater threat to helicopters or CAS like the Warthog than they are to jets dumping ordinance. This has been proven pretty decisively in Ukraine.
Radar is line-of-sight. A non-stealth fighter flying just above the treetops can only be detected if it gets within a few miles of a SAM radar. This is true to the point that the radar lock range for something like an F-35 is about the same as a non-stealth jet flying super-low (though the hit probability is lower for the F-35 if it's flying at high altitude as it has more room to detect the launch and maneuver).
The problem is that CENTCOM is actively lying to us. After this shootdown, they denied it happened while launching search and rescue operations only admitting to the facts after Iran released the evidence. The same thing happened with the F-35. CENTCOM said it landed safely, but were simultaneously sending an Chinook to run search patterns in the area. This could also mean that the alleged Kuwaiti pilot that supposedly took out 3 of our F-15 was also a lie.
Finally, with so many non-stealth planes getting shot down and stealth allegedly working great, why are we using so many stand-off munitions still and why aren't we using F-35 more?
All the shootdowns have been shown with a custom software showing an IR view and the successful missiles seem to be using electro-optical tracking. The IRST is passive and doesn't trigger sensors plus isn't stopped by our radar stealth. At the same time, a human operator means stuff like flares don't work anywhere near as well. Even more scary, these human-guided runs are premium training material for China to train AI-guided missiles.
My conclusion is that stealth is no longer the game-changer it was once though to be (if it ever was).
After the bombardment by Israel last year Russia sent a ton of Manpads, so they are certainly available. We've seen a very close call by an fa18 from a manpads. It's likely that Iran has passive sensor networks that they can use to spot patterns and provide forewarning to manpads teams.
I think you're right about stealth not being quite the game changer that it was. The Houthis were able to give f35s some close calls over Yemen last year. They're of course armed and trained by Iran, so we would expect to see some hits.
Yeah I have seen the clip with Iran polices firing at the UH-60s, which is very concerning. Sure SIGINT makes sure there is no serious AD but there is no way to guarantee that there is no MANPADs somewhere close.
Which is why any "adventures" that involve boots on the ground will come with a significant rise in US casualties. Few Americans have likely seen the videos from the Russian Invasion, of what modern war with $1000 quadcopters dropping grenades on terrified soldiers looks like.
Not sure, but I'd wager it was shot down using their 358 missile (aka SA-67). The missile can be fired from a rail on a truck and will patrol an airspace for a time until finding a target using an infrared seeker. Since it uses an infrared seeker (combined with it being fairly small), makes it incredibly difficult be detected by radar, while stealth tech is a fairly useless counter measure.
That's because they primarily sent stealth aircraft and Tomahawks over Baghdad. They also used decoys to draw out SAM missiles, and then F-4s would strike the SAM sites directly, which over time meant that the surviving SAM launchers did not fire when targets made themselves known. However, they did do some non-stealth missions. The most well know was Package Q, which involved dozens of aircraft, and two F-16s were shot down.
The thing about the First Gulf War was that it was four months of buildup, 45 days achieving air superiority, and about 100 hours of a ground war. It was well planned, and involved a collation of of forces that shared a common purpose and common goal. The allied coalition made sure to get their intelligence correct and worked hard to disassemble the Iraqi defenses before sending the armed forces into real danger.
The current conflict involved Donald Trump thinking that Iran, a nation of 93 million people with a relatively healthy economy (at least at the national and regime level, which can sell a lot of petroleum), was going to put up the same kind of fight that Iraq did, then a nation of 18 million with old tech, or like Venezuela did, a nation of perhaps 30 million today, that has faced extended total economic collapse, hyper inflation, and a mass exodus of something like a quarter of the population over the past 6-10 years. There was virtually no planning, with initial action going off of intelligence of where Khomeini would be and just jumping at that.
We've got an administration run by a narcissist that has surrounded himself with sycophants and bottom feeders. He's pissed off every ally we have, acted prematurely as the aggressor with an assassination strike, and now doesn't have the resources to protect the strategic assets in the region let alone convince Iran that the conflict needs to end in our favor. Just a ridiculous number of unforced errors. A complete embarrassment.
> The Claude C Compiler illustrates the other side: it optimizes for
> passing tests, not for correctness. It hard-codes values to satisfy
> the test suite. It will not generalize.
This is one of the pain points I am suffering at work: workers ask coding agents to generate some code, and then to generate test coverage for the code. The LLM happily churns out unit tests which are simply reinforcing the existing behaviour of the code. At no point does anyone stop and ask whether the generated code implements the desired functional behaviour for the system ("business logic").
The icing on the cake is that LLMs are producing so much code that humans are just rubber stamping all of it. Off to merge and build it goes.
I have no constructive recommendations; I feel the industry will keep their foot on the pedal until something catastrophic happens.
This is why you write the tests first and then the code. Especially when fixing bugs, since you can be sure that the test properly fails when the bug is present.
When fixing bugs, yes. When designing an app not so much because you realize many unexpected things while writing the code and seeing how it behaves. Often the original test code would test something that is never built. It's obvious for integration tests but it happens for tests of API calls and even for unit tests. One could start writing unit tests for a module or class and eventually realize that it must be implemented in a totally different way. I prefer experimenting with the implementation and write tests only when it settles down on something that I'm confident it will go to production.
Where I'm at currently (which may change) is that I lay down the foundation of the program and its initial tests first. That initial bit is completely manual. Then when I'm happy that the program is sufficiently "built up", I let the LLM go crazy. I still audit the tests though personally auditing tests is the part of programming I like the very least. This also largely preserves the initial architectural patterns that I set so it's just much easier to read LLM code.
In a team setting I try to do the same thing and invite team members to start writing the initial code by hand only. I suspect if an urgent deliverable comes up though, I will be flexible on some of my ideas.
One thing I want to mention here is that you should try to write a test that not only prevents this bug, but also similar bugs.
In our own codebase we saw that regression on fixed bugs is very low. So writing a specific test for it, isn't the best way to spend your resources. Writing a broad test when possible, does.
Not sure how LLM's handle that case to come up with a proper test.
I'd argue the AI writing the tests shouldn't even know about the implementation at all. You only want to pass it the interface (or function signatures) together with javadocs/docstrings/equivalent.
Writing the tests first and then writing code to pass the tests is no better than writing the code first then writing tests that pass. What matter is that both the code and the tests are written independently, from specs, not from one another.
I think that it is better not to have access to tests when first writing code, as to make sure to code the specs and not code the tests that test the specs as something may be lost in translation. It means that I have a preference for code first, but the ideal case would be for different people to do it in parallel.
Anyway, about AI, in an AI writes both the tests and the code, it will make sure they match no matter what comes first, it may even go back and forth between the tests and code, but it doesn't mean it is correct.
Tests are your spec. You write them first because that is the stage when you are still figuring out what you need to write.
Although TDD says that you should only write one test before implementing it, encouraging spec writing to be an iterative process.
Writing the spec after implementation means that you are likely to have forgotten the nuance that went into what you created. That is why specs are written first. Then the nuance is captured up front as it comes to mind.
Tests are not any more or any less of a spec than the code. If you are implementing a HTTP server for instance, RFC 7231 are your specs, not your tests, not your code.
I would say that which come first between specs and code depend on the context. If you are implementing a standard, the specs of the standard obviously come first, but if you are iterating, maybe for a user interface, it can make sense to start with the code so that you can have working prototypes. You can then write formal documents and tests later, when you are done prototyping, for regression control.
But I think that leaning on tests is not always a good idea. For example, let's continue with the HTTP server. You write a test suite, but there is a bug in your tests, I don't know, you confuse error 404 and 403. The you write your code, correctly, run the tests, see that one of your tests fail and tell you have returned 404 and not 403. You don't think much, after all "the tests are the specs", and change the code. Congratulations, you are now making sure your code is wrong.
Of course, the opposite can and do happen, writing the code wrong and making passing test without thinking about what you actually testing, and I believe that's why people came up with the idea of TDD, but for me, test-first flip the problem but doesn't solve it. I'd say the only advantage, if it is one, is that it prevents taking a shortcut and releasing untested code by moving tests out of the critical path.
But outside of that, I'd rather focus on the code, so if something are to be "the spec", that's it. It is the most important, because it is the actual product, everything else is secondary. I don't mean unimportant, I mean that from the point of view of users, it is better for the test suite to be broken than for the code to be broken.
It is more like a meta spec. You still have to write a final spec that applies to your particular technical constraints, business needs, etc. RFC 7231 specifies the minimum amount necessary to interface with the world, but an actual program to be deployed into the wild requires much, much more consideration.
And for that, since you have the full picture not available to a meta spec, logically you will write it in a language that both humans and computers can understand. For the best results, that means something like Lean, Rocq, etc. However, in the real world you likely have to deal with middling developers straight out of learn to code bootcamps, so tests are the practical middle ground.
> I don't know, you confuse error 404 and 403.
Just like you would when writing RFC 7231? But that's what the RFC process is for. You don't have to skip the RFC process just because the spec also happens to be machine readable. If you are trying to shortcut the process, then you're going to have this problem no matter what.
But, even when shortcutting the process, it is still worthwhile to have written your spec in a machine-readable format as that means any changes to the spec automatically identify all the places you need to change in implementation.
> writing the code wrong and making passing test without thinking about what you actually testing
The much more likely scenario is that the code is right, but a mistake in the test leads it to not test anything. Then, years down the road after everyone has forgotten or moved on, when someone needs to do some refactoring there is no specification to define what the original code was actually supposed to do. Writing the test first means that you have proven that it can fail. That's not the only reason TDD suggests writing a test first, but it is certainly one of them.
> It is the most important, because it is the actual product
Nah. The specification is the actual product; it is what lives for the lifetime of the product. It defines the contract with the user. Implementation is throwaway. You can change the implementation code all day long and as long as the user contract remains satisfied the visible product will remain exactly the same.
> The much more likely scenario is that the code is right, but a mistake in the test leads it to not test anything.
What I usually do to prevent this situation is to write a passing test, then modify the code to make it fail, then revert the change. It also gives an occasion to read the code again, kind of like a review.
I have never seen this practice formalized though, good for me, this is the kind of things I do because I care, turning it into a process with Jira and such is a good way to make me stop caring.
Thank you, I wasn't aware of this, this is the kind of thing I wish people were more aware of, kind of like fuzzing, but for tests.
About fuzzing, I have about 20 years of experience in development and I have never seen fuzzing being done as part of a documented process in a project I worked in, not even once. Many people working in validation don't even know that it exists! The only field where fuzzing seems to be mainstream is cybersecurity, and most fuzzing tools are "security oriented", which is nice but it doesn't mean that security is the only field where it is useful.
Anyways, what I do is a bit different in that it is not random like fuzzing, it is more like reverse-TDD. TDD starts with a failing test, then, you write code to pass the test, and once done, you consider the code to be correct. Here you start with a passing test, then, you write code to fail the test, and once done, you consider the test to be correct.
> I have never seen fuzzing being done as part of a documented process in a project I worked in
Fuzzing, while useful in the right places, is a bit niche. Its close cousin, property-based testing, is something that is ideally seen often in the spec.
However, it starts treading into the direction of the same kind of mindset required to write Lean, Rocq, etc. I am not sure the bootcamp grad can handle writing those kinds of tests. At least not once you move beyond the simple identity(x) == x case.
Also, if you find after implementation that the spec wasn't specific enough, go ahead and refresh the spec and have the LLM redo the code, from scratch if necessary. Writing code is so cheap right now, it takes a different mindset in general.
Agreed 1000%. But that can be a lot of work; creating a good set of tests is nearly as much or often even more effort than implementing the thing being tested.
When LLMs can assist with writing useful tests before having seen any implementation, then I’ll be properly impressed.
from experience, AI is bad at TDD. they can infer tests based on written code, but are bad at writing generalised test unless a clear requirement is given, so you the engineer is doing most of the work anyway.
My day job has me working on code that is split between two different programming languages. I'd say LLMs are pretty good at TDD in one of those languages and a hot mess in the other.
Which, funny enough, is a pretty good reflection of how I thought of the people writing in those languages before LLMs: One considers testing a complete afterthought and in the wild it is rare to find tests at all, and when they are present they often aren't good. Whereas the other brings testing as a first-class feature and most codebases I've seen generally contain fairly decent tests.
At my job we have a requirement for 100% test coverage. So everyone just uses AI to generate 10,000 line files of unit tests and nobody can verify anything.
> everyone just uses AI to generate 10,000 line files of unit tests and nobody can verify anything
This is not a guaranteed outcome of requiring 100% coverage. Not that that's a good requirement, but responding badly to a bad requirement is just as bad.
Yeah this is the exact kind of ridiculousness I've noticed as well - everything that comes out of an LLM is optimized to give you what you want to hear, not what's correct.
Long time ago in France the mainstream view by computer people was that code or compute weren't what's important when dealing with computers, it is information that matters and how you process it in a sensible way (hence the name of computer science in French: informatique. And also the name for computer: “ordinateur”, literally: what sets things into order).
As a result, computer students were talked a lot (too much for most people's taste, it seems) about data modeling and not too much about code itself, which was viewed as mundane and uninteresting until the US hacker culture finally took over in the late 2000th.
Turns out that the French were just right too early, like with the Minitel.
> The LLM happily churns out unit tests which are simply reinforcing the existing behaviour of the code.
I always felt like that's the main issue with unit testing. That's why I used it very rarely.
Maybe keeping tests in the separate module and not letting th Agent see the source during writing tests and not letting agent see the tests while writing implemntation would help? They could just share the API and the spec.
And in case of tests failing another agent with full context could decide if the fix should be delegated to coding agent or to testing agent.
> At no point does anyone stop and ask whether the generated code implements the desired functional behaviour for the system ("business logic").
Obvious question: why not? Let’s say you have competent devs, fair assumption. Maybe it’s because they don’t have enough time for solid QA? Lots of places are feature factories. In my personal projects I have more lines of code doing testing than implementation.
It’s because people will do what they’re incentivized to do. And if no one cares about anything but whether the next feature goes out the door, that’s what programmers will focus on.
Honestly I think the other thing that is happening is that a lot of people who know better are keeping their mouths shut and waiting for things to blow up.
We’re at the very peak of the hype cycle right now, so it’s very hard to push back and tell people that maybe they should slow down and make sure they understand what the system is actually doing and what it should be doing.
Or if you say we should slow down your competence is questioned by others who are going very fast (and likely making mistakes we won't find until later).
And there is an element of uncertainty. Am I just bad at using these new tools? To some degree probably, but does that mean I'm totally wrong and we should be going this fast?
There is a saying: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
I have personally outpaced some of my more impatient colleagues by spending extra time up front setting up test harnesses, reading specifications, etcetera. When done judiciously it pays off in time scales of weeks or less.
Developers aren't given time to test and aren't rewarded if they do, but management will rain down hellfire upon their heads if they don't churn out code quickly enough.
How about a subsequent review where a separate agent analyzes the original issue and resultant code and approves it if the code meets the intent of the issue. The principle being to keep an eye out for manual work that you can describe well enough to offload.
Depending on your success rate with agents, you can have one that validates multiple criteria or separate agents for different review criteria.
You are fighting nondeterministic behavior with more nondeterministic behavior, or in other words, fighting probability with probability. That doesn't necessarily make things any better.
In my experience, an agent with "fresh eyes", i.e., without the context of being told what to write and writing it, does have a different perspective and is able to be more critical. Chatbots tend to take the entire previous conversational history as a sort of canonical truth, so removing it seems to get rid of any bias the agent has towards the decisions that were made while writing the code.
I know I'm psychologizing the agent. I can't explain it in a different way.
I think of it as they are additive biased. ie "dont think about the pink elephant ". Not only does this not help llms avoid pink elphants instead it guarantees that pink elephant information is now being considered in its inference when it was not before.
I fear thinking about problem solving in this manner to make llms work is damaging to critical thinking skills.
Assigning different agents to have different focuses has worked for me. Especially when you task a code reviewer agent with the goal of critically examining the code. The results will normally be much better than asking the coder agent who will assure you it's "fully tested and production ready"
My only hope is that all of this push leads in the end to the adoption of more formal verification languages and tools.
If people are having to specify things in TLA+ etc -- even with the help of an LLM to write that spec -- they will then have something they can point the LLM at in order for it to verify its output and assumptions.
> At no point does anyone stop and ask whether the generated code implements the desired functional behaviour for the system ("business logic").
its fun having LLMs because it makes it quite clear that a lot of testing has been cargo-culting. did people ever check often that the tests check for anything meaningful?
15years ago, I had tester writing "UI tests" / "User tests" that matched what the software was cranking out. At that time I just joined to continue at the client side so I didn't really worked on anything yet.
I had a fun discussion when the client tried to change values... Why is it still 0? Didn't you test?
And that was at that time I had to dive into the code base and cry.
I think it boils down to how companies view LLMs and their engineers.
Some companies will do as you say - have (mostly clueless) engineers feed high level "wishes" to (entirely clueless) LLMs, and hope that everyone kind of gets it. And everyone will kind of get it. And everyone will kind of get it wrong.
Other companies will have their engineers explicitly treat the LLMs as collaborators / pair programmers, not independent developers. As an engineer in such a company, YOU are still the author of the code even if you "prompted" it instead of typing it. You can't just "fix this high level thing for me brah" and get away with it, but instead need to continuously interact with the LLM as you define and it implements the detailed wanted behaviors. That forces you to know _exactly_ what you want and ask for _exactly_ what you want without ambiguity, like in any other kind of programming. The difference is that the LLM is a heck of a lot quicker at typing code than you are.
Building a C compiler should not have this problem. There is probably a million test suites coming from outside the LLM that it can sue verify correctness.
Honestly, unit tests (at least on the front-end) are largely wasted time in the current state of software development. Taking the time that would have been spent on writing unit tests and instead using it to write functionally pure, immutable code would do much more to prevent bugs.
There's also the problem that when stack rank time comes around each year no one cares about your unit tests. So using AI to write unit tests gives me time to work on things that will actually help me avoid getting arbitrarily fired.
I wish that software engineers were given the time to write both clean code and unit tests, and I wish software engineers weren't arbitrarily judged by out of touch leadership. However, that's not the world we live in so I let AI write my unit tests in order to survive.
You are overvaluing “clean code.” Code is code, it either works within spec or it doesn’t; or, it does but there are errors, more or less catastrophic, waiting to show themselves at any moment. But even in that latter case, no single individual can know for certain, no matter how much work they put in, that their code is perfect. But they can know its useable, and someone else can check to make sure it doesn’t blow something else up, and that is the most important thing.
>LLM happily churns out unit tests which are simply reinforcing the existing behaviour of the code. At no point does anyone stop and ask whether the generated code implements the desired functional behaviour for the system ("business logic").
You can use spec driven development and TDD. Write the tests first. Write failing code. Modify the code to pass the tests.
Mwahahahahaha! Suffer, devs, SUFFER! KNOW MY PAIN!
Ah hem... Welcome to the wonderful world of Quality Assurance, software developing audience. That part of the job, after you yeet your code over the fence, where the job is to bridge the gap between your madness, and the madness of the rest of the business. Here you will find: frustration, an ever present sense the rest of the world is just out to make your life more difficult, a creeping sense of despair, a hot ice pick in the back of your mind every time the language model does something syntactically valid, but completely nonsensical in the real world, the development of an ever increasing time horizon over which you can accurately predict the future, but no one will believe you anyway, a smoldering hatred of the overly confident executive with an over developed capacity for risk tolerance; a desire to run away and start a farm, and finally, a fundamental distrust of everything software, and all the people who write it.
Don't forget your complimentary test framework and swag bag on your way out, and remember, you're here forever. You can try to check out, but you can never leave.
Actually, they extremely bad at that. All training data contains cod + tests, even if tests where created first. So far, all models that I tried failed to implement tests for interfaces, without access to actual code.
They can, but should be explicitly told to do that. Otherwise they just everything in batches. Anyway pure TDD or not but tests catches only what you tell AI to write. AI does not now what is right, it does what you told it to do. The above problem wouldn’t be solved by pure TDD.
I don't really use anthropic models. But when I tried it with others they can write tests but they never confirm that they fail before they proceed to make implementation that causes them to pass. Maybe I didn't prompt it forcibly enough.
I haven’t tried this (yet), but I’ve heard of people disabling write access to test code while the agent is writing implementation and vice versa. I imagine “disabling” could be done via prompting, or just a quick one liner like: chmod -r 0644 ./tests
> All it really shows is that the “poor” are getting milked for everything they earn and own
How are you concluding that? The only way I can see that could be true is if the bottom 50% has shifted their meagre savings to spending in an effort to stay afloat.
I find this to be dubious because the bottom 50% was never saving much at all in the first place. For context, the median income across planet earth is $850 USD _per year._ There's not a lot of room at the bottom for savings.
99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer) almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and virtually no one even bothers to understand the magic at layers 1 & 2. These all represent successful, effective abstractions for developers.
In contrast, unless you believe 99% of "software development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding", it's off the mark to describe LLMs as a new layer of abstraction.
To the contrary. Time Machine is for consumers. Most people use it either with an external hard drive (good for iMacs that stay in one place) or a NAS (good for MacBooks). Apple even sold the AirPort Time Capsule at one point. Since that was discontinued, Synology NAS is the main consumer-friendly alternative. It comes with dedicated Time Machine support. It's supposed to be easy setup and forget. That's the whole point of using Synology instead of alternatives that require more technical expertise, that aren't designed for Time Machine support straight out of the box.
> [Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support
Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.
Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations.
I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:
> Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine
I wasn't even assigning blame, did you mean to reply to someone else?
I was just replying to your point that a Synology NAS "is not what most users would consider 'consumer technology.'" It's firmly in the consumer technology category.
Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.
I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
All the problems you mentioned can be reframed as positive feedback for the economy we’re evolving into. Let me dream the arguments for each of your bullet points:
1. Power fail-over (battery + generator backup) in every house?
- I recently listened to a Planet Money episode about how DC/AI infrastructure needs are driving up electricity prices in Ohio. Ordinary households end up paying higher bills while big entities plan/build for reliable power.
- Maybe household-level infrastructure could be improved as part of making this kind of model viable. This applies to networking infrastructure too
3. Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks
- People with enough education can be trained, and with the incentive of being paid, households themselves could become the technicians.
4. Probably don’t want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices
- Same idea: if households are being paid and it’s “their role” to manage, the access concern gets reframed as operational responsibility.
5. Massive theft risk
- Theft risk already exists today (even in good neighborhoods). The incremental risk might be negligible.
6. Homeowner’s insurance would probably…
- If we squint hard enough, there are arguments here too (e.g., payments not missed, additional compensation).
I'm sure they were in a constant struggle for survival and had to "move fast" to stay afloat, but their technology is more than a decade in the making.
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