2025 Israel - Iranian conflict
- Thread starter Maikeru
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
A bit of an apples and oranges comparison. Desert Storm was also a massive land war which required the sea lift of vast amounts of armour and other assets that takes a long time to transit. It was also a coalition operation so was limited by the speed of the slowest coalition partner.
If this time the US is only seeking to do air strikes and cruise missile attacks, it only needs to wait for sufficient air and naval forces to get in theatre.
This is also the ticking clock element where Israel is fast running out of interceptor missiles. Although this might become a moot point if Iran really is somehow scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to its offensive capabilities against Israel.
But even then it’s hard to see this dragging on for months before the US finally commits.
They sure got really cozy with Modhi's India, ignoring the growing relationship between India Intelligence agencies and the Mossad. And that backfired spectacularly with all the Mossad operations in the country.
Iran can force a ground fight by rocket mining the Straits of Hormuz and sinking civilian ships there with ASMs and ASBMs. It's 20 km wide and mountainous forest on the Iranian side. The only exposed assets would be light infantry forward observers with TELs hiding in the mountains or 1000s of km back. They'll then need to occupy the Iranian side to stop forward observers.
If the parts about cancelling projects and seizing solar equipment is true, this is incredibly stupid on their part.
Perhaps the death of Raisi and election of reformists changed their strategic outlook that much but what kind of silly political system would allow that. They are desperate for foreign investment and especially power projects. I think it might be that the domestic business lobby is very strong as I have seen that with cars and even solar panels they always want tech transfer and local production or they put up barriers. It seems that they may have allowed themselves to have the worst elements of third world democracy while still being cast internationally as ultra-authoritarian. All the negative reputation with none of the capacity.
There's a not unreasonable chance that should CENTCOM find itself facing greater Iranian resistance than expected or whatever rosy picture CG Mike Kurilla painted, Trump will declare victory and call it quits after some B-2 and/or B-52 bombers "successfully" strike Iranian UGFs, that would've otherwise been beyond Israeli reach, assuming Iran agrees to refrain from launching more missiles against Israel and/or if it's no longer in a position to do so for now.
In Yemen, when the got , Trump made peace with the Houthis, so there's precedence for such a scenario. Trump even went so far as to express his admiration for Houthi bravery:
Not sure if Trump will have similar praise for the Iranians, but if regime change is not achieved in Tehran in the next few months, if not next several weeks, Trump might "kick the can down the road" and circle back against Iran next year before the midterms.
Trump has zero interest in executing something like Operation Desert Shield or Operation Iraqi Freedom. He might not be as against "forever wars" as he had claimed, but he also knows sending hundreds of thousands of American troops into Iran isn't going to win him much favor or praise at home.
TBF Iran is bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, so a serious ground invasion of Iran isn't necessarily something the US is even capable of without activating significant reserves, if not a visible and significant surge in USMC and US Army recruitment.
As such, Trump wants to minimize the role US ground troops will play as the conflict escalates against Iran. In fact, Trump might even tell the Israelis and the Israel Lobby to "fuck off" if they starting demanding actual ground invasion.
Iran has launched ballistic missiles torwards Israel
So basically what was extremely clear from the jd Vance post
The past few launches have been very low numbers. There's a very real chance the TELs to launch missiles have significantly been degraded hence rendering the missile stocks as practically useless. Doesn't help they can be struck during any attempt.