Except the US has zero intention of getting into a ground war in Iran. They will bomb the place to ruin and can call it quits anytime they want.
I'm sorry but this is some truly harebrained take, on par with ppl saying "Germany could have won ww2 just by blitzing Stalingrad, not sieging it".
Sending planes over prepared defenders isn't gonna achieve anything except lost planes and civilian deaths, since it's civilians that can't convinently run away or go into forts.
Air power cannot hold ground, but ground troops can’t do anything against air power either.
Any type of air defense says hi.
Iran doesn’t have anything like robust enough an air force or IADS to be able to trouble the US. The US can just bomb them with near impunity with F35s and JDAMs.
Iran has better AA vis a vis what Vietnam had when US attacked them. And better AA vis a vis US than Ukraine has vs Russia.
JDAM or more likely here JASSM-ER all require a kill chain to be completed and gives ample time for prepared defenders to just... Run/pop back into concrete forts. Unless you have ground troops pinning them, you'll still get the occasional lick in with just airpower, but the efficiency will be awful.
As shown by how Hamas only suffered marginal damage so far despite being a comparatively tiny force with awful equipment besides just fortifications. Or how long the Mariupol/Bakhmut clusters survived.
The US is still the hegemon less and until China directly challenges and defeats it. The world will do as much about them bombing Iran as they are currently doing against Israel for genociding the Palestinians.
For me at least hegemon implies an uncontested controller, which US may be for the northern American continent, but having suffered military defeat to China's proxy forces even as far back as around the 1960s, disqualifies him from claiming to be a true military hegemon. Neither can you be an economic/industrial hegemon while having no2 largest economy.
If China or Russia directly challenges it to take advantage of its window of vulnerability, then that’s WWIII. And to he frank, no one is starting WWIII over Iran.
The US can and will just turn Iran into a failed state by systematically destroying its economic, industrial and military capabilities from the air.
And also the ground, because otherwise there won't be an Israel or bases for them to go back to. Iran's first line of defense are it's proxies that all have large rocket arsenals and are inside fortifications that have been built up for decades. So US army need to start sieging first, or airbases will just get rocketed.
Iran’s only defence is its strong offence where it can deal Israel some mighty blows. But under American bombardment, they face the ‘use it or loose it’ dilemma. If Israel is prepared to endure the pain, they actually don’t have that many other cards to play. Hezbollah is a defensive force. They can give the IDF a bloody nose playing defence, but they don’t have the heavy weapons to launch effective offences to invade Israel.
I don't doubt that they can make Iran into a failed state and destroy all Iranian strongholds around the middle east after years of protracted campaign. I also don't doubt they will kill a million Iran soldiers while only losing hundreds of thousands... IF they can afford to commit 100% of their military power and mobilize economically for the full duration of that time.
It's a big if, and with US so incredibly vulnerable during that time, it'd be a shame if US had other, far more powerful enemies that they need to respond to. Because their lines elsewhere in the world might look like the Russian border defenses once Iran SMO gets going.
Again, Russians afford that because they only gotta worry about fighting 1 enemy.
Iran’s only credible deterrence will be having its own nuclear arsenal. If they achieve nuclear breakout, they can afford to grow a spin and be a mad dog like North Korea. Unless and until that happens, they need to play it smart or they will get spanked.
Does China want or need Iran to have credible deterrence? Iran is bait for US, like Ukraine was supposed to be bait for Russia.
