… but that won’t change any minds
It’s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.
Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.
As many people have pointed out to me over the years, I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.
The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.
This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks, each capable of carrying one AEGIS-controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptor. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.
Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200–250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in an anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles, etc., hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.
A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences and requiring the USN to “declare victory and go home”.
As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.
Like CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. The carrier-based air arm fired most of its Tomahawks from a safe distance, with only modest effects. Iran responded by attacking land bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.
The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposing a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender — no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary nation to surrender without the deployment of land forces.
Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A Navy official, quoted in the Guardian, says:
The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.
More succinctly, a former official said:
They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.
The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.
The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.
The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.
But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all), reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.
Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.
* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear Armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.
{ 38 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 09.04.26 at 1:39 pm
Now, this effort has meant that thousands of seamen and naval officers will get campaign ribbons and perhaps other medals; they will have accrued various kinds of hazardous-duty, extended-deployment, and other bonus pays. And it may have an effect on re-upping: making it less likely that the sorts of sailors who believe such deployments to be foolhardy will continue their careers; and making it more likely that those who found it a jolly adventure will stick around.
So I do wonder what the medium-term effect on the quality of naval strategic thinking will be. Certainly naval officers don’t like to see their hulls junked and many would like to see their ships and crews deployed to effective purpose; but only time will tell how this plays on the American navy as a naval-strategy-advisory group.
Seekonk 09.04.26 at 2:42 pm
“The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear Armageddon from the deep ocean floor … now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone”
It is homicidally insane to resolve disputes via modern weaponry. The conflicts in Iran, Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan, and everywhere else should be settled by binding arbitration. Nation-states that claim to be the good guys should be the first to propose it.
steven t johnson 09.04.26 at 4:28 pm
Nor am I a military specialist of any kind, neither military history in general nor in naval history in particular. As John Q probably knows Robert Farley a front pager at Lawyers Guns and Money does have credentials and as John Q predicted that navalist hasn’t seen fit to change his mind. Indeed, Farley has approvingly cited a post from Bret Devereaux at his Acoup blog defending the US navy as basically a world-historical benefit to humanity. (But in my view if you scratch Devereaux’s appealing veneer of social liberalism, he has far more in common with Victor Davis Hanson than is usually understood.)
I definitely agree that no naval blockade defeats a continental country without defeat of land forces as well. What I don’t agree with is the notion that the war is over. It is not campaign season in the Gulf, that is coming up with cooler weather. It is premature to declare this phase the endgame. Even a limited land incursion designed to turn the blockade of Iranian oil into a genuinely strong one and resuming some degree of passage of allied oil from the Kingdom et al would be a reckless gamble, with shocking casualties even if deemed successful in its fundamental goals.
More likely seizure of Qeshm Island or Bandar Abbas or whatever (Kharg?) will fail. The thing is, as I understand official US nuclear doctrine calls for the use of nuclear weapons to retrieve defeats posing an existential threat *even to expeditionary forces in other countries.* Personally I believe tactical nukes have been in theater, complete with target lists, since the beginning. And trial balloons for things like attacking Tehran’s water supply have already been floated.
Since I also believe that Trump is in many respects already de facto dictator, regardless of how loosely consolidated, as that looseness does not apply to foreign affairs. The only constraint I see there is the officer corps. Hegseth has been working hard on that. So I see high chances for a continuation of the war. I confess I do wish for the defeat of Trump’s murderous adventure. And since Trump is the US as of now, I concede that means wishing the US was in fact defeated. But I think defeat looks more like Saigon in 1975 or Kabul more recently.
Alex SL 09.04.26 at 8:18 pm
Seekonk,
In my mind, the question immediately arises why a country as unilaterally able to bomb smaller nations into rubble like the USA would willingly accept arbitration results in favour of that smaller nation, followed immediately by how arbitration results would be enforced, even in a hypothetical world where all nations are of approximately equal power, without the use of modern weaponry.
steven t johnson,
Two possibilities for how this simply fizzles out: The US leadership get bored and decide to declare victory. Or the US leadership accept internally that they have run out of options short of nuclear weapons, do not want to cross that line at least, and decide to declare victory. Who can say, but I am cautiously optimistic. The main problem in my eyes is that as long as Trump is in charge, no decision is ever final, as he may reverse it the next week and order the next set of strikes.
equalitus 09.05.26 at 2:46 am
While I implicitly sent a warning [via twitter/X] to the former Ayatollah & the Iranian Government in the beginning of the year, I didn’t really think much about what if a military attack actually happened? At least two of the demands of the US Government I agree with, Iran must stop all funding of Hezbollah & the Houthis.
According to academic experts, probably 300k-400k troops are needed to control the main cities in Iran if ground forces would be used. It would remove an uncertain future threat to the Hormuz strait & the allies of the US in the region. The Iranian Government ‘factors’ including IRG & others are religious fundamentalists so they are not average risk averse to a possible overwhelming military force, which obviously only makes it more certain that while some containment seems to be happening, the Iranian Government won’t change course until it is removed or reformed by outside forces.
While some or many US military experts are not surprised of what happened so far, the US air force & naval force ‘special operation’ seemed to strengthen the knowledge before the war started, while some damage to the Iranian military was easily accomplished, the mission will never complete without a substantial ground invasion.
Alex SL 09.05.26 at 7:36 am
Regarding the title “The US Navy loses another war”, it always leaves me a bit uncomfortable to see the various adventures of the USA discussed in that way. Sure, Vietnam was lost in the sense that US troops retreated ingloriously, and the same could be said by the same logic about Afghanistan. I also appreciate the concept of not achieving war goals. Still, in cases where the US military never even attempted to hold territory but mostly blew up some foreign people who the media don’t really count as people until getting distracted by the next news cycle, I find it difficult to speak of “lose”.
What, apart from ammunition and a few overseas bases and soldiers that are minuscule compared to the losses in infrastructure and military and civilian victims on the other side, have the USA really “lost”? What is more, the ammunition and bases can be rebuilt. Has Iran occupied, say, Florida, or at least destroyed key infrastructure on the US mainland? More to the point of the title perhaps, has the USS Abraham Lincoln been sunk? The fleet hasn’t even diminished in its utility compared to before the war (it was close to zero, it is close to zero, nothing gained, nothing lost). Were the USA forced to make concessions dictated by Iran? It seemed for a moment like that might be the case, but also no.
Yes, the USA are economically in a worse position than before, but again Iran is much worse off in comparison. So, calling this a loss feels analogous to saying that a man ‘lost the fight’ because he sprained his wrist in beating his neighbour to a pulp, was ultimately dragged away by his angry partner, and now has to spend the night on the couch. Not the main point, I know, but the framing makes a difference too, I think.
John Q 09.05.26 at 7:53 am
Alex SL. This is zero-sum thinking when negative-sum thinking is appropriate. The par outcome in war, and all kinds of political violence, is not, A loses -> B wins. It is “both lose”
If the man in your story did not succeed in gaining his original object and came back with a sprained wrist, he lost regardless of how badly he hurt his neighbour. Even more so if he went backwards wrt his object, clearly the case here.
steven t johnson 09.05.26 at 5:53 pm
Alex SL@4 By my assessment “US leadership”=Trump. Despite all the cliches about TACO Trump, to my memory Trump rarely (ever?) genuinely reverses policies, he doesn’t deliver on threats. For instance, so far as I know, the MEU sent in is not back in barracks, but still there. Personally, while we are doing long-range mind-reading of a future Trump, my read is: The man who kidnaps a foreign president and takes a whole country’s oil (personally? the revenue goes to a foreign bank as I understand it, who really controls that?) or plans to rule Gaza forever as lifetime president of the Board of Peace is not someone who has any discernible principles or rational thoughts about use of nuclear weapons.
Although your remark about the US bombing countries into rubble wasn’t directed at me, I will note that air power alone doesn’t, historically speaking, reduce countries to rubble, or even reduce them to surrender The closest any army ever came in the age of air power is the war against Korea. Being pounded to rubble is not the same thing as defeat…unless of course the real purpose of the war was to terrorize other peoples and states with what might happen if they got out of line.
Alex SL 09.05.26 at 11:05 pm
steven t johnson,
I agree, nothing is off the table. Still, that or him getting distracted by something else is the little optimism I have left.
John Q,
Sorry, but I disagree. If somebody’s goal is to hurt somebody else or to satiate their own ego, they have achieved their desired outcome.
As an aside, for entire countries, this gets even more complicated. During Bush II, a guy in a Bolivian taxi asked me, presumably to hear the perspective of a gringo, what I thought the USA were getting out of the Iraq war. My answer is similar to now: probably only billions of dollars of debt and thousands of fallen, but that is the wrong question; the question is what Bush, Cheney, the Republican Party at the next election, and defense contractors get out of it, and they do not care the slightest that the USA as a whole are worse off. I find that a lot of the time, the question of why did a large box [humanity/nation/party/corporation/team] do an utterly stupid thing that will destroy it in the long run is answered by it being rational for a smaller box inside [fossil fuel industry/governing party/party faction/CEO’s Linkedin profile/team leader’s promotion prospects].
You can contemplate the destroyed lives and wasted economic potential on both sides and declare each war lose-lose. But when Rome committed genocide against Carthage, they eradicated what had been their main rival in dominating the Mediterranean; several European nations grew obscenely rich from colonialism; and when colonies fought their wars of independence, they won the ability to govern themselves. It is would be rather difficult for me to accept that Rome lost against Carthage, that Spain lost against the Inca empire, or that the fledgling USA lost against Britain, because from the perspective of a fallen soldier, war is always lose-lose. That’s not what the concept of victory means.
Conversely, the point here (and again, not the main one, because on navies being nearly entirely boondoggles, I agree completely) is that the USA and their navy did not lose under any reasonable definition of that word; they merely did not win. They caused considerably more suffering to the other side and will in the end walk off with a draw, except under three potential futures: the US government yet decides to do Afghanistan II but worse; the US government decides to murder millions of civilians with a nuclear bomb; Iran does what you mentioned in your piece and manages to sink most of a US fleet. If none of these eventuate, future historians will speak of a draw that was humiliating for the USA, and even the little box on the right in the Wikipedia article will read to the effect of “Losses: USA ca. 500, Iran ca. 200,000. Outcome: inconclusive [Israeli and Chinese strategic victories]”.
John Q 09.06.26 at 1:42 am
Alex SL, most of our disagreement is about how to use words, and such disagreements can’t be resolved
But I want to correct you on the substantive point that aggressive war can easily be profitable for the victor. That was true when wealth was mostly about things or people) you could steal and carry away (cattle, gold, slaves) But is ceased to be true over the course of the 19th century for wars between modern countries (even the European empires mostly ran at a loss) Angell got the analysis right in The Great Illusion even if Europe’s rulers ignored him and engaged in war that brought nearly all of them to ruin.
Whatever word you want to use for it (you can call it a draw if you want), the normal outcome of war under modern conditions is that both sides end up worse off than if the war had never happened. That will be true in spades of the current war, even if Iran ends up with control of the straits of Hormuz.
Jimmy P 09.06.26 at 2:24 am
I feel compelled to comment on the endnote re: submarines as a former submarine officer. And while I admit to a bit of a reflex to defend subs’ usefulness, I’m not sure I can or want to. That said, and acknowledging that the OP is not about subs – and explicitly sidestepped exactly this discussion – I’ll just note the following (unconnected by any particular thesis):
1) D.S. Battistoli @1: IMHO You have a very good intuitive grasp of the forces that shape the officer corps, at least at the O4-O6 ranks. If you didn’t serve as a junior officer, you could have fooled me.
2) Having spent time on a ballistic missile sub (a “boomer”) on patrol, I can attest that the sailors on board train very, very hard to do their job well. And they constantly pray that they’re never called upon to do it for real. It makes for a surreal working environment.
3) My permanent duty station was on “the ordinary kind” of submarine (a fast attack boat) – and as such, my training was on the many missions they can do. And they are many, beyond anti-surface warfare and strike capabilities. And definitely many – probably most – but maybe not all – of these missions could be achieved more cheaply by other means. Maybe having a single platform that can do all of these missions on its own may be valuable in and of itself (it feels like the economists present may have a word for that.) But otherwise it does often feel like overkill.
5) One mission I feel fairly confident that submarines are the most effective platform for is antisubmarine warfare. Which seems like a silly reason to keep them, maybe – but then all sorts of things are done for silly reasons.
6) I thank God that my service ended well before January 20, 2017.
equalitus 09.06.26 at 1:04 pm
There is a chance that the US military conflict against Iran could go on for years as a low intensity small scale war similar to what we have seen from the war started and that the current US Congress won’t legislate a large invasion which would be necessary to make a regime change in Iran. How likely & how difficult is it to force the Iranian Government to stop funding the Houthis & Hezbollah?
steven t johnson 09.06.26 at 1:48 pm
John Q@10 “…the normal outcome of war under modern conditions is that both sides end up worse off than if the war had never happened.” Yes, in one sense I agree, Angell was correct.
The phrase “both sides” needs a little specification: The owners/rules of two different states are not the same both sides as the whole population of two different states. It is the latter who always suffer net loss in war, regardless of victory or defeat. And neither population as a whole wins net gain. But the relevant decision makers are instead the owners/rulers. These vested interests both capture more gains and avoid more losses, victory may mean the preservation of their enterprise, even if it is reduced in size and prosperity. Better to reign in rubble than to go broke in peace, as a new Milton may speak for them?
Thomas P 09.06.26 at 4:33 pm
equalitus, it would be a better question to ask what to do to strengthen the regular Lebanese army and protect the Shia so that Hezbollah isn’t necessary. They were formed in response to one of Israels invasions, and as long as the Lebanese military doesn’t even try to defend their territory, it´s hard to blame Hezbollah.
LFC 09.06.26 at 5:22 pm
steven t johnson @8
What you refer to as “the war against Korea” was actually a war against North Korea (and later China, when it intervened).
John Q 09.06.26 at 10:57 pm
STJ, the distinction between rulers and ruled is important, but the same applies to both. The rulers who started the Great War (emperors, kings, Prime Ministers) almost all lost their jobs by the time it ended, and some lost their lives as well
J-D 09.07.26 at 5:50 am
Teacher and educational theorist John Caldwell Holt wrote that the best learning environment of his life was a submarine during the Second World War: everybody on board (he wrote) wanted to understand as much as they could and to help everybody else understand as much as they could, not because of exhortations from anybody else but because they all understood how much it mattered to them.
oldster 09.07.26 at 11:00 am
I am persuaded by your critique, John, but have you gone on record with your positive proposals?
Are you proposing that Australia (e.g.) or the US simply disband its navy? That they should persist, but adopt merely defensive postures close to the home shore? That the Australian navy should be reduced by 50% and the US by 80%?
I’m simply curious to know what sort of vision you have for the role of navies in the defense of nations. And then also whether you think that any nation or coalitions of nations ought to use navies for the policing of sea lanes and suppression of piracy.
You’ve probably written about this before, so a link or two will be gratefully accepted.
Tm 09.07.26 at 12:38 pm
Regarding the Alex/JQ disagreement, it is clear that the US as a country is by any rational standard worse off, weaker than before the war of aggression against Iran. Likewise, Russia as a country is by any measure worse off and weaker (economically, militarily, politically) than before the war of aggression against Ukraine. That seems to justify the label “loser”.
And yet what is absolutely perplexing is that there are few indications that the ruling classes responsible for these strategic disasters are any worse off than before. Putin’s power hasn’t declined, it has gotten ever greater, not just over Russia but, as crazy as that sounds, he is in the process of wining Western Europe. Yesterday Putin won an landslide election in a German state, a minuscule one to be sure (2.5% of the German population), but still. This was absolutely a Putin victory, 44% of the voters voted for the Putin party not despite but *because* of the Ukraine war (and together with BSW, the other pro-Putin party, they are close to 50%). Pro-Putin forces are winning almost everywhere in Western Europe (Orban’s hard won defeat was a setback to be sure but it has had absolutely no impact on the Pro-Putin parties in France, Germany or UK).
And Trump? His popularity is in the cellar, to be sure, in part because of the Iran war disaster (but really it’s because of gas prices, if the prices were lower none of this would even matter), but is his position really any weaker? Absolutely not. And amazingly, while losing at home, Trump keeps winning elections in – South America. Fascists whose main campaign promise was to govern as a Trump puppet have won almost all the important elections in the last few years, and even Brazil might follow. It seems that fucking up in the most public way possible is now a net positive for the ruling class. The more they fuck up the more power they get. Nothing makes any sense any more.
Tm 09.07.26 at 12:53 pm
This is obviously related to your observation “The rulers who started the Great War (emperors, kings, Prime Ministers) almost all lost their jobs by the time it ended”
This might still happen of course. But The Ukraine war has now gone longer than both WWI and the Soviet Great War and it hasn’t hurt the regime. The Iraq and Afghanistan adventures have gone on for even longer, all counted, and **none of the initiators have suffered any adverse consequences**. The only one punished for Afghanistan was Biden, for ending it.
It is by now commonplace to observe that there simply don’t seem to be consequences for screwing up any more. None among the rich and powerful ever suffer consequences for the crimes and mistakes they commit, and nobody expects this to change any time soon. That may be the most depressing aspect of this shitty century.
steven t johnson 09.07.26 at 4:32 pm
I think this is quite funny, prompting what was once called “Homeric” laughter. My apologies if it doesn’t strike you the same way.
“Oh, one other thing; just because John Quiggin has decided to write something on naval affairs doesn’t mean it needs to be sent to me. Whatever his other virtues, Dr. Quiggin is not a serious voice on naval questions and I don’t need four e-mails in my inbox every time he posts something about boats on Crooked Timber. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Alex SL 09.07.26 at 9:40 pm
Tm,
The difference between USA-Iran and Russia-Ukraine is that the latter have invaded. If they are ultimately beaten back, yes, everybody would agree that they lost the war. It simply isn’t the same if the USA blow up Iran’s leader, navy, aircraft, large numbers of civilians, and then walk away because they have run out of missiles. Monty Python probably didn’t mean the viewer to conclude that King Arthur lost the fight against the “it is but a flesh wound” guy either.
Contemplating Russia-Ukraine and equalitus’s suggestion at 12, I wonder if this is increasingly going to be the new normal: wars that never quite end, in many cases never even formally declared. Just larger powers endlessly stomping on weaker countries, no real war goals except some combination of appearing strong in the domestic media and destabilising others. International law ignored, protections for prisoners of war gone because they are now “enemy combatants” instead of soldiers, no more trying to rescue enemy sailors from drowning, no more formal declaration of war, no more peace treaties, just low scale war spreading and spreading across the world.
hix 09.07.26 at 11:09 pm
“Likewise, Russia as a country is by any measure worse off and weaker (economically, militarily, politically) than before the war of aggression against Ukraine.”
At this point, i got to disagree with weaker militarily. Russia lost lots of old material that turned out to be relativly useless in modern war and lots of people, including trained ones. But it still won expertice in modern warfare and built up it´s industrial base of things that still do work. It is just not particular obvious because the opponent gained more in strength.
John Q 09.08.26 at 2:14 am
Hix – the lessons Russia has learned about drones etc are useful only in defensive warfare and in terror bombing, which never works. Aggressive war needs tanks, ships and planes, which are all gone. For the moment, that’s irrelevant, but it means that new counter-drone technology, if it arrives, won’t help them. And their industrial economy is a mess.
Tm 09.08.26 at 8:04 am
One more thought (not novel at all). We tend to think wars are fought for strategic, political goals, and when they fail to reach those goals, we think the war was a failure, at best futile, pointless. But what if the war itself is the point? Waging war is a risk but it also has big advantages for a ruling class that doesn’t care about the damage war inflicts on others. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Carl Schmitt) and war is the ultimate exception. Waging war is how they affirm and consolidate their power. It may not always work ultimately but it seems to work often enough.
This brings me back to WWI. It’s true that the ruling classes in several countries (especially those that lost) were discredited by the war and were initially removed from power. But in the medium term, at least in Germany and Austria, it turned out that it wasn’t the authoritarian militarists who had started the war that were blamed for the disaster – it was the democrats and socialists and pacifists. The authoritarians came roaring back to power. Not despite but because of all the suffering they had caused.
Zamfir 09.08.26 at 9:22 am
About drone for defense: thr typical European worry is that Russia manages a quick invasion of some part of the Baltics (claiming they are protecting a local Russian-speaking population), then dare Nato or the rest of Europe to counterattack.
In that scenario, an experienced Russian drone army and industry is a great asset even if it is only ‘defensive’ . It means that western European countries (let alone the US) would have to send their troops to assault the drone wall, while the local populists are on Twitter explaining that the Baltics are really Russian anyway and not worth dying for.
It doesnt even have to work out for Russia, as long as succes is plausible enough that they risk the gamble.
John Q 09.08.26 at 8:24 pm
TM “Waging war is a risk but it also has big advantages for a ruling class that doesn’t care about the damage war inflicts on others. “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Carl Schmitt) ”
Didn’t work out brilliantly for Schmitt, let alone his sovereign.
Zamfir, it’s the quick advance that’s the problem. It seemed entirely plausible in 2021, with only US retalation the real fear. But the Russian advance in Donetsk has averaged 10 km^2 per day over the last year, which does not suggest useful learning for a future invasion.
politicalfootball 09.08.26 at 9:08 pm
If somebody’s goal is to hurt somebody else or to satiate their own ego, they have achieved their desired outcome.
Yes, losing a war can serve the goals of someone associated with the losing country. Indeed, the elder Bush may have suffered a personal defeat because of his country’s victory at war, and Bush the Lesser may have likewise assured a personal victory by not winning his war in a timely fashion.
And yeah, there are degrees of victory and defeat. And Trump probably embarked on the Iran War figuring it would be a win for him, regardless of the outcome for the country.
It seems clear, though, that by any sensible definition, this war is a defeat both for the US and Trump, whatever impact it has on Iran. To say otherwise, we’d have to suggest that the key war aim was to create widespread destruction, and by that definition, it’s pretty much impossible for the US to lose a war. But that’s a frivolous definition of victory.
WTFGhost 09.08.26 at 11:36 pm
I always think that Iraq was the war of the IED, and we lost that, and Iran is the war of the drone, and, it’s like, did we ever take our IED lessons, and think about what would happen if an IED could fly? And like, if you could crank out the flying hardware from prebuilt components that keep getting cheaper, or a 3d printer, solder, and a few metalworking tools?
In some ways, this reminds me of a science fiction story, “and then, came the weapons store, and the people took up arms, and everything was good, and kind, and just again.” I was a gun rights supporter at the time, and it seemed too over-the-top.
Well, we live in that world. The amount of security needed, to live a halfway normal life, when any bozo with a few weeks of thinking could drop a grenade, to a pre-planned, open air, location, from a long distance, is unthinkable, so we need to start thinking what else to do. We can’t think our mighty fighty jets will protect us from drone swarms too low for RADAR to discern ’em.
Me, I say we should stop being a Trump, and start caring about human life again. (Apologies to those whose last name collides with that of the fetid toad that oozes slime on the resolute desk.)
Jimmy P 09.09.26 at 1:15 am
J-D @ 17: yes, can confirm based on my experience. I’ll have to check out John Caldwell Holt. Any particular recommendations?
J-D 09.09.26 at 12:06 pm
No one book more than another. He has a Wikipedia page which has brief remarks about his. books individually and which you might find suggestive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_(American_educator)
It’s my understanding that his first book, How Children Fail, was his most successful, and so it may be the easiest to find a copy of, but I feel I should add that his ideas evolved over his career so that his latest books reflected opinions which had not emerged earlier.
But this has nothing to do with naval or military affairs.
equalitus 09.09.26 at 1:49 pm
While the Vietnam war was extremely different than the war we are debating now, some goals of the US were achieved at least partially, but no change of the economic system & no change of the government & no change of the political system of dictatorship & no change of allegiance, still some commentators thought it scared other nations from becoming systemically aligned with the Soviet political sphere of influence. Last part is possible but hypothetical.
What also was learned in the Iran war is that expensive missile systems aren’t something that even the top 10 most productive economies in the world [by nominal GDP] can easily produce & replenish.
hix 09.09.26 at 8:26 pm
Not convinced that Russia could do that much with it´s old tanks, i do conceed that i forgot about the degradation of the conventional airforce.
Regarding the terror weapons, Russia just seems to be set on using things for terror that are perfectly usefull for military targets.
As far as any fear of Russia overwhelming nato with an offensive, or nato ex us, at this point even Poland alone… that is not really something that seemed viable for me either way.
Alex SL 09.09.26 at 9:15 pm
politicalfootball,
No, it is possible for the USA to lose a war: try to take land and be beaten back, or be struck by missiles on their own territory until they have to sue for peace to make that stop. But if the war we are talking about is the USA raining destruction onto a much weaker country while the US territory may at most get hit by an isolated terror attack, yes, it is really impossible for the USA to lose such a war, by definition of “rain destruction onto a much weaker opponent who cannot meaningfully retaliate”. The USA can at most unilaterally decide that causing more destruction overseas is getting to expensive.
I know this is hard to accept – any decent person wishes to see aggressors lose – but that is the reality of the enormous power imbalance between the USA and nearly every other country on the planet. In the present case, and to stay on topic for the thread, it may at a stretch be possible to argue that the USA had lost if Iran had managed to sink its fleet in the Gulf (in marine analogy to a land army being beaten back from occupation of Vietnam or Afghanistan), but that hasn’t happened either, unless they are suppressing that news very well.
LFC 09.10.26 at 8:47 pm
equalitus @32 wrote:
The very hawkish Walt Rostow argued this or a variant of it — unconvincingly, IMO — but he was in the minority among those who participated in U.S. war planning. Robert McNamara came to see it as a mistake (see his memoir In Retrospect) and so did McGeorge Bundy, though he didn’t live to write a retrospective book on it. But see Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. There is, admittedly, a “revisionist” historical take on the Vietnam War — see, for instance, Mark Moyar’s books — but I’m not inclined to go down that rabbit hole (just speaking for myself).
LFC 09.10.26 at 8:53 pm
P.s. More precisely, Rostow argued that the war gave other countries breathing space to pursue a non-Communist “modernization” (again, I don’t find this line of argument convincing).
politicalfootball 09.11.26 at 9:28 pm
We agree: If the goal of the war in Iran was to cause destruction, then we won. I wonder why the US hasn’t withdrawn following its victory.
JQ was right. Any disagreement we have is about the use of words.
equalitus 09.12.26 at 8:07 pm
The political goals of the Iran war are several very different factors, to reduce the financial support to Hezbollah & Houthies, damage or destroy probable nuclear research facilities, & regime change, but the last part is probably mostly impossible unless US ground troops are sent to Iran.
There was talk of the Kurds as a potential ground force that the US could support but they would possibly not be military strong enough even with the support of the US Air Force in the region, & NATO country Turkey is strongly opposed to having the Kurds take over the Iranian Government even for a few years.
And could the Kurds be trusted to leave the power in Government if they loose an election after a few years?
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